OliveOyl
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I passed my MOMA photo course! (Got a 91.40%) Me so smart. Sometimes, I think I like looking at photography more than paintings and have certainly gotten a lot of inspiration from a lot of photographs over a lot of years. In 2017, I created an entire painting around this one photo. And may I say, I don’t even like what I did with it but what else is new. In this course, the final peer-reviewed essay had to be 300-500 words, and we had to choose one of the week’s lesson and then tie the photo we chose into what we learned. You want to read it? Well, duh. Of course you do…it’s exciting stuff.
One night, while reading the New York Times, I was struck immediately by this image and sat, mesmerized. I ripped it out of the newspaper and saved it, thinking that someday, I needed to make a painting of this photo. It’s called “Cockfight,” and was taken in Vinales, Cuba in 2016 by an award-winning, Chilean photographer named Tomas Munita. Of course, I googled his name to see his amazing body of work and there, on his website he was described as “an independent documentary photographer with a main interest in social and environmental issues.” Looking at the photo, I assumed the men are watching a cockfight because the description is in the title. I also assumed he was presenting a record of contemporary rural Cuba, while also trying to get the viewer to understand something about the place such as the current culture and identity of the people. At first glance, it seems like straight documentation.
In the Week 3: Documentary Photography lesson, I learned that photographers often play with ideas of authenticity. One way to do this might be to choose an unusual framing of the subject which can then help to shape a specific narrative. In this photo, with a title of “Cockfight,” we don’t actually see a bird anywhere. Munita appears to have taken the picture, at ground level, and is peering upward, as if he wanted to present the point of view of the bird. This particular and unusual choice raises questions. Was there even a bird there at all? Was this a candid shot or were the men “posed” to look as if they were watching a cockfight? The intention of that choice makes me wonder how “truthful” the image is, and if Munita was really trying to make more of a critical commentary about the event, as opposed to simply recording what he saw.
This intentional choice of point of view led me to interpret Munita’s photo in the following ways. First, I puzzled over who was the object and who was the subject, and never settled on an answer. Second, because the composition looked slightly staged, it conveyed a theatricality that I instantly read as a kind of grand tableaux. In fact, the first thing I said to myself was that it looked “just like a painting.” Third, I was seeing this right after the 2016 election so maybe it’s not surprising that an image with menacing mobs of angry men directing their energy at (me/we/us…represented by “the bird”), would stop me in my tracks. As a painter, I felt an urgent need to “appropriate” Tomas Munita’s image so that I could reconstruct my own unique narrative. This one photo represented perfectly (and beautifully) how I was seeing my own “current culture and identity of the people” at that specific moment in time.
One night, while reading the New York Times, I was struck immediately by this image and sat, mesmerized. I ripped it out of the newspaper and saved it, thinking that someday, I needed to make a painting of this photo. It’s called “Cockfight,” and was taken in Vinales, Cuba in 2016 by an award-winning, Chilean photographer named Tomas Munita. Of course, I googled his name to see his amazing body of work and there, on his website he was described as “an independent documentary photographer with a main interest in social and environmental issues.” Looking at the photo, I assumed the men are watching a cockfight because the description is in the title. I also assumed he was presenting a record of contemporary rural Cuba, while also trying to get the viewer to understand something about the place such as the current culture and identity of the people. At first glance, it seems like straight documentation.
In the Week 3: Documentary Photography lesson, I learned that photographers often play with ideas of authenticity. One way to do this might be to choose an unusual framing of the subject which can then help to shape a specific narrative. In this photo, with a title of “Cockfight,” we don’t actually see a bird anywhere. Munita appears to have taken the picture, at ground level, and is peering upward, as if he wanted to present the point of view of the bird. This particular and unusual choice raises questions. Was there even a bird there at all? Was this a candid shot or were the men “posed” to look as if they were watching a cockfight? The intention of that choice makes me wonder how “truthful” the image is, and if Munita was really trying to make more of a critical commentary about the event, as opposed to simply recording what he saw.
This intentional choice of point of view led me to interpret Munita’s photo in the following ways. First, I puzzled over who was the object and who was the subject, and never settled on an answer. Second, because the composition looked slightly staged, it conveyed a theatricality that I instantly read as a kind of grand tableaux. In fact, the first thing I said to myself was that it looked “just like a painting.” Third, I was seeing this right after the 2016 election so maybe it’s not surprising that an image with menacing mobs of angry men directing their energy at (me/we/us…represented by “the bird”), would stop me in my tracks. As a painter, I felt an urgent need to “appropriate” Tomas Munita’s image so that I could reconstruct my own unique narrative. This one photo represented perfectly (and beautifully) how I was seeing my own “current culture and identity of the people” at that specific moment in time.
