Artist Statement

I surrendered wholly to Hemingway’s 1932 literary embrace of bullfighting. In Death in the Afternoon, Heming-way narrated and choreographed the ceremonial life of the matador and the ritualized elegance that electrifies the life experience described as a “dance with death.” Hemingway educated me via his explanatory glossary of bullfighting’s terminology, and of greater importance to me were sixty-five pages of photographic illustrations by the great bullfighting photographers of the time, Vandel and Rodero. It was vintage black-and-white photographs of the great matadors Juan Belmonte and the first great Joselito that inspired me to take on this journey to expe-rience – through my eyes and my camera – the truth of the bullfight. My research immediately led me to Joselito, the greatest bullfighter of our time. Not Jose Gomez, the earlier notable Joselito of the 1910s, killed by a bull in the legendary Plaza de Talavera, but the contemporary Joselito, José Miguel Arroyo Delgado, born in Madrid in 1969, who was to become my source of inspiration for the full month of August 1997.