Folk Pride · Part I
"Folk Pride" is a major personal project that Txema Yeste has been developing for many years. Still in progress, it explores the relationship between regional dress, cultural memory and the communities that preserve it.
He travels across Spain with his team and a mobile studio, setting up in each locality to photograph participants ranging from children to older people. The work requires extensive coordination, bringing together the people, their clothing and the photographic production.
Photography is accompanied by detailed documentation of the garments, their local names, accessories and jewellery. The ambition is to build an ethnographic archive encompassing the country’s different communities, recording both inherited forms of dress and later versions adopted as expressions of local identity.
In his 2022 text on the project, dress historian and anthropologist Juan de La Cruz emphasises its dual value: the documentation of regional clothing and Yeste’s ability to bring a contemporary photographic vision to it.
For us, this is an important part of his personal work, and it deserves more than one chapter. Today we introduce the project. In the coming chapters, we will return to its places, its people and its photographs.
The gallery is open, as always, by appointment.
