Incisive Moments

Penas tiene mi mare
penas tengo yo y las que siento
son las de mi mare que las mis no.

Heart wrenching strains of a cante jondo grip my heart and stop me mid-stride.

Overhead the sound bubble showers the aching music over me, drawing me into Prohibido El Cante. Flamenco Y Fotografía, an exhibit at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo.







Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo is a converted monastery, repurposed as a regional arts center. Its walls and spaces echo its cloistered past,











and oddly contain and soften the sounds and images of flamenco captured in the exhibit.

Part of PhotoEspaña, a year-long celebration of photography, the 200 photographs of Prohibido El Cante span an intriguing aesthetic of dance, music, artistic vision and technique. Visually drawn to flamenco, artists such as Robert Capa, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ortiz Echagüe, Isabel Muñoz, Paco Sánchez and 64 others sought to elicit the passion, the movement through gelatin silver, photogravure, carbon fresson and other photographic processes.



MAN RAY
Danzas horizontales, 1934
copy of original in Georges Pompidou Center, Paris



ARCHIVO SERRANO
Academía de baíle del Maestro Otero, Sevilla, ca. 1905
Copy of original, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla

In the end, though, flamenco is about attitude.