title: Magenta Pass

(see the full-size close-up below)

While free-lance writing and photographing in Spain for 3½ years I had ample opportunity to photograph the bullfights. Primarily, however, I wanted to capture them not only in stark black and white befitting this tragic spectacle, but I wanted to capture both the motion and emotion in a still photograph. These were made in Spain 49 years ago when no one else was interested in this kind of photo. Everyone then wanted stop action shots which to me were unrealistic of such a moving drama of life and death in the bullring.

So I shot the photographs from the stands on high contrast Panatomic X black and white film using an Edixa 35mm camera and lens. I purposely shot a slow shutter speed of 1/25^th second to capture the blur of the action. I shot into the sun so that my figures would be back-lighted with a white background. I wanted no grays, only salt-and-pepper images. I processed my film for high contrast. The portion of each tiny film frame that included my subject was smaller than the tip of my little finger. To enlarge it to 8x10 inches, I mounted an enlarger horizontal in a bedroom and focused on the grain at the far end of the room with a magnifier. I focused by rigging a Spanish Windlass on the focusing wheel and controlling it from across the room with strings. Exposures were incredibly long. On occasion up to 45 minutes per scene. If I guessed wrong and had to repeat the effort that took another 45 minutes more or less. You can be sure it was a slow process involving many nights in that darkroom.

These prints were scanned at a high dpi and little more than sizing and spotting was done by the Photoshop program. I made almost 100 prints of the bullfights in this manner; the resulting scenes are what I set out to capture – stark black often blurred silhouettes of men and bulls engaged in this centuries old spectacle on a hot, sunny afternoon.

This is a close-up image from the full-size print, showing the detail involved