User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.