This image, called "Spanish Wake" was taken by W. Eugene Smith in 1950 in the Spanish village of Deleitosa and it captures the intimate wake of a Spanish villager. When it was published in Life magazine in 1951 it was captioned as “His wife, daughter, granddaughter and friends have their last earthly visit with a villager.” The image is part of a series by Smith titled "Spanish Village", Smith was in Spain in 1950, he has been asked by Life Magazine to report on the food supplies in Spain under the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Smith decided that he did not want to photograph something as simple as the status of food supplies, as he wanted something with a heavier political slant to it, Smith wanted to capture images which would show the state of the country, the poverty, strife and fear due to fascist rule; especially since the USA was about to ally itself with Spain.
At
first glance, we see a small group of women gathered around a
deceased man. They look upon him with mixed expressions, mainly of sadness and
loss. The scene is one of sorrow.
The
scene has been tightly framed with the daughter in the centre of the
rule of thirds grid, the grandmother in the intersection of the left
vertical and the top horizontal lines, the mother is in the intersection of the
right vertical and the bottom horizontal line. It is cropped to contain the
scene between the deceased and the women; there is nothing is
existence outside of the crop which can interfere with the image. It
has been cropped and framed so that the light passes over the mourners and
falls away to the right of the image, behind the women. By using only one
flash and paraffin oil lamps, Smith has kept
the lighting down to a minimum.
At
the same time the image is balanced so that it flows down from the top right
down to the face of the deceased. This allows us to see the main elements of
the scene, the three generations of women and the man. The main
meaning of the image is one of loss and mourning, they sit beside the deceased
and reflect on his impact on their lives, their environment
and how the loss will impact them personally. The mother figure is lost in
thought, her gaze directed out of the scene down paying no attention to the
photographer instead her loss overcasts everything else. The daughter
gazes directly at his face, her loss showing in her expression, she too appears
lost in her thoughts.
From
a social perspective (Punctum) the scene represents poverty, the
walls are peeling and the participants in the scene are garbed
simply, the women in dark peasants clothes and the man in a simple
suit, with no tie and no other possessions of worth. They have little
money for a larger wake and now they live in fear and insecurity regarding the
future, they are filled with melancholy. The darkness that Smith
created with his lighting permeates the scene, providing both an
overcast feeling and one of foreshadow, the future is bleak and unknown.
Upon examine the
scene further for intertextuality, we have to ask ourselves, where are the
men, will they come to a different wake? Is the social structure in
such a way that men and women cannot mix at a juncture like this? What was the
deceased like as a person, was he warm and friendly or was he a
harder patriarch of the family guiding from his decisions and choices
alone.
At times when
interpreting this image, my mind casts back to the time of my own father’s
death and its influence on my own life, watching my family discuss how we would
pay for the funeral and how to protect my mother from poverty now that the
income to her household had dropped significantly. The feelings that is
has brought to mind almost certainly have to be taken into account as I look at
the scene.
The lighting of the
image is simple enough and even with the image being monochrome I can
still see a Caravaggio influence on the final image,
the Chiaroscuro lighting effect used by Smith is very similar
to Caravaggio's 1602 painting "The Taking of Christ".
Whilst in Caravaggio's painting the balance of the image
moves horizontally from right to left, the lighting is the same, it
is cast upon a dark background which swallows the light and isolates the faces
of the figures that are the main element of the painting.
In Conclusion,
Smith tried and succeeded in his aim. With one simple scene he has
shown that life in Spain at that time was hard and uncertain. The inhabitants
of the village have been shown to be poor and simple, their lives sustained day
to day, while they know little of the life outside the village, they known that
the political situation under Franco is unpredictable and uneasy. Smith
has quietly done this by the use of light making the image dark and hence
our interpretation is darkened in the classical manner.
During my research
I discovered that the image had been altered slightly. Whilst taking
this particular image, two of the
women, the wife and the daughter were looking across the room towards
Smith. Smith in his darkroom darkened their eyes and
applied bleach with a fine-tipped brush to create new whites of their eyes,
redirecting their gazes downward and to the side. This in turn makes the image
more sympathetic to the villagers, making them objects of sympathy, when
in truth it turns the image from one of sadness and reflection into
one where the photographer has disturbed and interrupted their wake
and it moved the image away from documentary photography into something which was
staged and makes it harder and darker, akin to the current day media
idea of poverty porn. Certainly, when the village
was revisited (Banning 1986/2014) the prevalent point of view from the
villagers was that Smith had portrayed them as savages and
that his final images were hurtful to all involved.
(1,152 words)
References
Altered Images. 2017. Eugene Smith - Spanish Wake. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/eugene-smith-spanish-wake/. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
Time/Life. 2013. 'Spanish Village': W. Eugene Smith's Landmark Photo Essay. [ONLINE] Available at: http://time.com/3876243/life-behind-the-picture-w-eugene-smiths-guardia-civil-1950/. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
Smith College Museum of Art. 2012. Paper+People W. Eugene Smith’s “Spanish Wake”. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/Cunningham-Center/Blog-paper-people/W.-Eugene-Smith-s-Spanish-Wake. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte. 2012. Spanish Wake. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/spanish-wake. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
National Gallery of Ireland. 2007. Caravaggio - The Taking of Christ. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.ie/taking-christ-michelangelo-merisi-da-caravaggio. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
Jan Banning. 2014. Eugene Smith’s ‘Spanish Village’ Revisited: the villagers’ struggle with being an icon.. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.janbanning.com/my-writings/eugene-smiths-spanish-village-revisited-the-villagers-struggle-with-being-an-icon/. [Accessed 11 August 2017].
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