What an amazing photograph!
What an amazing photograph!
Visually, not much to write home about: a standard example of a press photo of the 1940-1960 period. The machine a Speed Graphic 4x5 camera; the subjects immobilized by light from a large flashbulb. Clumsy shadows and a dull background. Forms awkward within the frame, leading to the suspicion that this image is cropped from an original.
But on the plus side is the satiny sheen of two male bodies at their youthful peak. And of course, the fabulous Muhammad Ali smile. That gives us a clue that the real power of this image lies in its timing. It makes you aware how crucial timing is to photography. There is Muybridge with elongated time; Harold Edgerton with nano-time; and Henri Cartier-Bresson who codified timing to a philosophic system: "the decisive moment." With this image the moment is not only decisive, it is historical.
We know these two young men, the professional prize-fighters Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. We know their past. and unlike the men themselves at that moment, we also know their future. That knowledge is why a photograph increases in potentcy after time has passed. Most photos have ambiguous narratives: facts described; plots usually hidden. But as time creeps on that narrative is increasingly entangled with the future. Not only is the timing of this picture decisive, it is also innocent of what will befall these men.
There is a discrepancy between what we know and what we see. What we see are two beautiful young men in their prime, enjoying an easy moment of camaraderie. What we know is that the same two young men spent much of their professional lives administering savage beatings to one another. Amid the orchestrated violence, there were times of triumph and times of shame. But all that is cultural history in our memory. On the surface of the image itself there is nothing but innocence; there is not a hint of the early death and the tragic illness that await these two young men. You might say that innocence is the engine that drives this image.
Think how skillfully the photographer impaled the moment which was as fragile as a butterfly. His skill is not unlike Ali’s ring strategy of “float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.” A moment before, maybe the two champions were snarling at one another; a moment later, maybe saying their goodbyes as they headed off to those futures. But for that brief moment, these two prizefighters, young men destined by circumstances to be always paired, were obviously enjoying a friendship they were seldom allowed to reveal publicly. From this one frozen glimpse of the truth comes an understanding of the fight game as profound as any thousand word article by Norman Mailer.
As I said, an amazing photograph. The two men were often photographed together but this image rarely appears on the internet and when it does it is always unaccredited. From its appearance it is probably originated from the news wires c. the 1960s. If anyone knows the photographer, he or she deserves a credit. It is too important an image to remain anonymous.
As a postscript, look at these variations by the same photographer. No more than a tick of time separates the images but now the decisive moment has become indecisive. William Eggleston famously said he didn’t need to take more than one picture of a given subject because there was always another picture around the corner. I think even Bill would agree that it was lucky this photographer went for three.
