The second journey ended yesterday. This one begins in 2007, the year I closed the chapter of representing models.
I had been running Elite Model Management in Spain, and what I kept from those years was not the modelling: it was that fashion kept putting me next to photographers, one after another. So when I set out to open an agency of photographers, I listed the Spanish ones I would want to represent, and crossed names off it until one was left. Txema Yeste. I asked him and, luckily for me, he said yes. Nineteen years later he is one of the five.
Born in Barcelona in 1972, he studied photography there and in Birmingham, then went into photojournalism, shooting for English and Spanish Sunday magazines. Fashion was not the plan. It arrived, and he has spent a career refusing to let it be only fashion.
He also drove across Spain photographing traditional dress village by village: the embroidery, the lace, the red stockings, the clothes a village keeps for its feast days. He shot them the way he shoots couture, because that is what they are. In November 2024 the Ministry of Culture of Spain bought fifteen of his photographs from this gallery, "Lagartera" among them, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Museo del Traje, Madrid, and the Museu del Disseny, Barcelona.
Then, from 2019 to 2024, he picked up pine needles, bent them, stood them up and photographed them against nothing. "At times, Yeste's needles look more like wire, evoking the work of the sculptor Alexander Calder, who had a very similar sense of play," wrote David Campany in the book. We hung the series here in 2025.
The film above is sixty photographs. It opens with the ones that have already found an owner.
In order of appearance: "Levitation, Assa Baradji, Ibiza", 2020 · "Needles", 2019-2024 · "Shanelle, Valentino, Vogue España", 2018 · "Lagartera", 2019 · "Blue Wishes, Jan Baiboon", 2023 · "Needles", 2019-2024 · "Taste", 2021 · "Full circle, Gomera", 2020 · "The Parade, Barcelona", 2024.
The works shown are available. The gallery is open, as always, by appointment.
