Isabel Muñoz: A Vision of a Detail or the Body as a Territory

By Kosme de Barañano

In Muñoz’s photographs, the human body with all its scars, tattoos and corporeality moves and is infused with light. Shots, bodies and frames of light are part of her photography; in a word, materialisation. In this collection of photographs, the starting point is a tribe of shepherds and warriors, the Nyangatom, who live on the shores of the river Omo in Ethiopia, in what was previously Abyssinia, near Kenya and the Sudan. They were taken in two stages, in 2004 and 2005. This is not the first time that her lense has focussed on an African tribe; her photographs of the Surma tribe were awarded the World Press Photo in 2004.

Although the images appear dispassionate, even cold, Isabel Muñoz’s vision is not in the least neutral. Like List during his most metaphysical phase, Muñoz seeks a “photography of the interior”, where the limits between reality and illusion are dissolved. List believed in the possibility of harmonising external images with the interior, and of showing the eternal nature of the human body. Fragments of sculptures, fragments of bodies and poses (in her Tango), of dress (in her Flamenco), of bull fighters’ poses (in her Bullfighting), of the gestures made by her Cambodian dancers, of the rituals written on the bodies of the Nyangaton, Muñoz’s photographs are essentially fragments of a great mosaic which tries to halt time. Light and sensuality seek to create a poetics, a song as music, a Klagelieder, a lesson on shadows.

Herbert List said “of the five senses, the gift of sight is the most important for me. This is why I direct my efforts towards the search for harmony between external appearances and the images I have inside me”. Isabel Muñoz brings time to a stop in order to concentrate on the details, and infuses volatile moments (of dance, sculpture, bodies, the curve of buttocks, the design drawn by fingers or palms of the hand, a scar, a tattoo) with the quality of a monument. Her way of feeling and communicating, of transferring the emotion of these timeless (or which at least transcend time measured by the clock) situations or places, is to capture it with her framing, and reveal it through her textures paper. Her way of feeling alive, of being free, is to devote herself to the quest and capture of images which are essentially evocations of her spirit.

Isabel Muñoz – Serie Omo River, Etiopia, 2002

Her style is not journalistic, although she have been awarded the World Press Photo in 2000 for her images of China, and again in 2004 for those of the Suma. Her photographs are not documentary, rather they represent encoded spaces for meditation, like a Haiku in their brevity. They form an autobiography, a book of hours, although they appear in the format of a travel journal. Emotions, sensations, bodies and places, surprise and displeasure, wounds and scars, are all recorded in this expressive discourse, a journey through many countries, among different tribes, which is essentially a journey into her interior. In some ways her photographs are a logbook of thought, in the same way as Joseph Conrad’s 1906 book, The Mirror of the Sea.

Her photography goes beyond the documental, beyond social journalism, to reveal itself as artistic activity. Dresses and surfaces, gestures and movements, together create an air of mystery. The tension between form and fabric, the delicacy of one detail in a composition, which in itself is perhaps brutal, keeps our gaze alert and the entirety is infused with the warmth, the temperature which the photographer’s vision gives us. Muñoz’s way of looking does not possess the object of her focus, we do not look into their eyes; distance and detail infuse everything with beauty. There is a mixture of muscularity and delicacy, an intimate atmosphere in the content of the photographs: the format is large, but deals with detail. Like Weston, Muñoz knows that whilst drawing or painting have their own language, photography deals with reality, capturing an aspect of reality through the lense, and simplifying it through the act of choosing it. This simplification is paradoxical: the use of detail increases the object of our gaze, a torso becomes an autonomous element, the photography moves beyond journalism to become an autonomous work.

What fundamentally underlies these photographs is obliqueness rather than transparency, historical reference rather than abstract images. They are audacious images revealing the elegance of an accurate focus, and a vision with much history behind it. The smile and the gestures of André Derain’s painting can also be found in Isabel Muñoz’s photographs of oriental architecture. In the Barroque photographs there is the same sensation of stone and of its plastic quality which distinguishes the sculptures of Bernini. The Cambodian dances sequence echoes the hand gestures captures in guache by Auguste Rodin towards the end of his life.

With the advent of photography, the reality of a mirror image was recreated, but the reflected images were now separated from their original medium: the daguerreotype and its variations have become documents whilst seeking something more. In 1858, Teophile Gautier indicated “our busy century does not always have time to read, but will always find time to look”, an assessment which continues to be valid. Isabel Muñoz’s work reflects, besides its Klageliederian nature, of lament for reality, the profound presence of Art History. An intelligent vision, like Julio Cortázar’s short stories, where her photographs are fragments, pieces of an unfinished mosaic. As this exhibition demonstrates, as a medium photography is not Important or innovatory in itself: what makes it these things is the capacity of the subject who uses it, and their capacity for visual thought, the fact that they have something to say and the ability to say it with art, with magic or whatever originality can be called. It is not Isabel Muñoz’s technical ability which forms the basis of her art but the poetic strength which imbues each of her images.

Extraxt taken from the “Ethiopia” exhibition catalogue. Courtesy of the author and the Galeria Dolores de Sierra, Madrid (Spain).

Kosme de Barañano is History of Art Professor and curator