Religion and the use of masks

Robert Cottrell — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:29:21 +0000

I spent the evening of Christmas day watching small children play with giant balloons on the main town square of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and realised belatedly what a colossal free gift the ease of visiting Mexico represents for residents of the United States. A stupid thing to say, I know, but until these past few days I had no sense of Mexico's inspiring vastness. It has, for me, exactly the right degree of dÃ©paysement: a foreign language I can just about navigate in print; tropical fruit and decent coffee; mountains; and music everywhere. My new year's resolution tonight will be to learn some Spanish.

On boxing day I was in a local museum marvelling at photographs of rural Oaxaca, all fairly modern, but which might have been taken at any time inâ€”ooohâ€”the past three hundred years or so, subject to the availability of a camera. Market scenes, hunting, weddings, men in animal masks. These pictures were by Ariel Mendoza BaÃ±os, a new name to me, and they delighted me more, I think, than any paintings could have done short of a show by Matisse.

The best photographers are doubtless geniuses, just as the best painters are. But it is easier to be a satisfying photographer than a satisfying painter: there is much more agreement on what constitutes a very good photograph, and there is more scope for letting the subject do the work.

In this case, it was the religious and ritualistic photographs that transfixed me. Why do pantheistic and animalistic rellgions always look so much more fun? It can only be the masks. Nobody wearing a stylised leopard's head can look entirely serious, at least in a photograph, however fierce they may think themselves. If anyone has it in mind to start a new Christian sect, I recommend the general use of grotesque masks as an attractive and distinctive feature. read more »

Communion with the dead

Robert Cottrell — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:27:04 +0000

I find "Impressed by Light", an exhibition of early British photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unexpectedly moving.

Roland Barthes was right to say that photography is a way of communing with the dead. There is the perfection of the likeness: life-likeness. There is also the physical chain of connection. The subject stood before the camera, which produced the negative, which made the print, which I look at now. It feels as though, with only a little supernatural aid, I could reach through the photograph and find the subjects still in there somewhere. Which may be a feeling I sometimes get with a painting, but it is never necessarily true in the way that it is with photography.

Another fascination is the completeness of the image. The photographer can choose the shot, but he must accept whatever it containsâ€”details to which he is indifferent, of which he is unaware, but which may come to dominate the picture for the viewer. For example: dress changes over time, but faces, by and large do not, so after a century we are likely to be much more struck by the clothes of a sitter than by the face. Conversely, because so much of Britain's housing stock goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries, I find it a pleasing shock to see a house looking exactly the same in a photograph taken 150 years ago as it might do today; a tiny, indirect reassurance to the durability, if not of my own life, then of some of the things that make up my experience.

Photography

Religion and the use of masks

Communion with the dead