“Los Toros” by Michael Crouser
I’ve been sad in the bullring, but also exhilarated beyond what can be found in everyday life. It makes one silent and it makes one gasp and stand and cheer and hide one’s eyes. And it is beautiful, if one cares to pay attention. Form and shape, made and gone. Partnering with that which wants you dead.- Michael Crouser [source].
For anyone who has seen a “corrida” [bullfight] it will come as no surprise if I say that the “corrida” is a mix of intriguing passion and elegant cruelty that some excuse because of its intense cultural tradition. The form, the style, the rules, the audience, the roar of the “bravos”, the connoisseur, “el matador”, the pure bravery of the bull [toro bravo], all colored with blood, painted with sweat, covered with dust, to bring the best and the worst of what humans are. It is an spectacle to photograph, the challenge to capture the dance of death.
Los Toros, a series by the great photographer Michael Crouser, was build over 16 years, and is being published in a beautiful book, with an introduction by the acclaimed Peruvian writer [and former candidate to the presidency of Peru] Mario Vargas Llosa. This is the best photographic series of the tradition of Los Toros I have ever seen. Pure art, not less. Few issues ago an interview with Michael Crouser was published in Lenswork, and you can read it at Michael’s website.
I am a photographer, and have been one since I was fourteen-years old. But it was not until 1996, when I emerged from my darkroom after spending, almost literally, a year and a half inside, that I felt I had found something of a voice in my work. When I looked over the stack of prints I had made, I started over-applying what had been learned and developed over this time to the earlier prints in the project. The prints that eventually came from this effort were reflections of a technical and aesthetic maturation, and I began to see the emergence of something truly very personal - a more refined mixture of what I had seen, how I had seen it and what I could make of it. At this point I felt my work could belong to no one else.
The prints are soft and dark, and although they can be somewhat ominous, I feel that many of the images also work toward a calm smile, or have the beginnings of a short, tight story. I try to eliminate the extraneous visual elements, leaving only the necessary shapes to form the composition. I’m not someone who consciously produces very literal, visual metaphors for my state of mind or the state of the world, but I would say that my best work feels like me, and thus it is the best expression of who I am. - Michael Crouser [source]
