James HillDías de San Isidro

JAMES HILL
Días de San Isidro

May 27 – June 26, 2011

Exhibition is part of Days of Spain in Russia, with support of Council of Spain.

The annual Festival of San Isidro, held every May since 1947 at Las Ventas in Madrid, is the most important celebration of bullfighting in Spain.  Each evening, at 7pm, more than 20,000 spectators come to watch the confrontation between Spain’s finest bulls and the world’s most famous matadors. 

James Hill, a veteran photographer of conflict as well as a portrait and artistic photographer, travelled to Madrid last year to gather the emotions of these evenings and journeyed into the countryside around the Spanish capital, visiting the farms where the bulls are raised.

Hill, who had never seen a bullfight before arriving in Madrid, was curious to both witness and examine this tradition in a project that was specially commissioned for The Year of Spain in Russia.  Aware of the debate within Spain over bullfighting - it remains hugely popular in many regions but has been banned in Catalonia from 2012 – he was also determined to observe it with an impartial eye. 
“Bullfighting,’” Hill says, “is an iconic and cultural statement of Spain.  Photographically it is important to respect this and yet, at the same time, to try unravel some of its layers. These images,” Hill adds, “are not those of an aficionado - someone who has an intimate knowledge of bullfighting - but rather those of someone looking onto the passion and danger with an outsider’s perspective.”
Most of the photographs are done in a traditional, sporting style with fast shutter speeds to freeze the action.  Many others are done using more artistic techniques, such as panning and slow shutters speeds, in order to accentuate the motion and colours, creating a less familiar representation of bullfighting.

Ernest Hemingway once famously remarked, “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” During last year’s festival Hill witnessed the goring of matador Julio Aparicio, which the bullfighter was lucky to survive.  “The spectre of death and not just that of the bull’s,” Hill says, ”hangs over every corrida.  I was trying to find the balance between conveying this danger, the strength of the animal and the wafer-thin line that exists between injury and art and, at the same time, give a sense of the extraordinary confrontation between these two beings. It is a theatre whose performance is both terrifying and breath-taking to watch.”
“Days of San Isidro” follows the termination of James Hill’s work on Russian veterans of WWII, “Victory Day” which was exhibited in 2010 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and which won “Book of the Year” at the 23rd Moscow International Book Fair. 

The book, “Days of San Isidro,” featuring these images as well as a text by matador Paco Camino, is being released by the Meshcheryakov Publishing House in May.


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