Uncanny Ability

November 14, 2021

Photograph of Dead Matador Manuel Granero (1922)

With the writer Ernest Hemingway, what is left unsaid on the page is as important as what is. In "Death in the Afternoon," his 1932 book on bullfighting, Hemingway writes this terse caption for a photograph of a dead matador named Manuel Granero laid out on a slab in an infirmary: “Only two in the crowd are thinking about Granero. The others are all intent on how they will look in the photograph.” As a photographer, I could not have left it unsaid better myself: the camera's uncanny ability to make every scene about itself.

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