April 25 - June 13, 2008, Space Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
Artist Talk: May 17, 1 P.M.
Read the Artist Statement
Catalog commentary by Jennifer Saffron, MFA
After a first wince and recoil, looking at Renee Rosensteel’s images of mixed martial arts fights becomes alluring. These are photographs of illicit acts, providing ample opportunity for voyeurism and imaginative thinking - a thrilling window into a seductive and scary place, where it’s perfectly cool to break someone’s bleeding face, complete with a shaven head and black tattoos. What is the occasion for this action? What is the occasion for these photographs?
“I like extremes. I like people who are getting down to the core of what’s real, what’s exciting, what’s frightening. And, in my work, I am drawn to images of valor – seeing these guys face something that’s scary inside themselves, then scary across the cage. It’s something I just don’t look away from.” As Renee Rosensteel says, she chronicles not discrete mixed martial arts fights but personal journeys similar to her own. A former fighter, Rosensteel trained in the 1990s for about six years and has been stage managing and photographing mixed martial arts events for about eight years. Circle of Truth, the name of her exhibit, is also the name of one of the many fights she has worked.
Beyond the fights, which serve up plenty of overt spectacle, Rosensteel takes these shots because she can anticipate them, as her knowledge of the form and the contenders clues her into the next jab. Her background and long-term relationships also grant her access; she’s an insider. “I have a pass to the boys’ club. A very different pass than most people - I’m allowed to go back to the locker rooms, and I’m welcome there,” shares Rosensteel.
Rosensteel’s ability to generate menacing studio portraits of these fighters, in concert with close action shots, speaks to her boys’ club status and her dual disciplines of photography and mixed martial arts. There is a raw authenticity in her work that is about both brawn and passion, in the subjects and in Rosensteel herself, who provides candid insights into a world she inhabits and loves. Rosensteel’s passions suit each other well, since photography and mixed martial arts both require spatial strategy and a keen feel for decisive moments: reading the situation, adapting, moving and transforming in order to gain access to the correct moment. The same “decisive moment” Henri Cartier-Bresson coined as the hallmark of the modernist photograph is the very decisive moment that delivers the undeniable knockout.
These moments, displayed as a composite of photographs offer primal content, granting us license to release our inner barbarian, that animal part of us beyond hetero-normative social code, beyond the mask of banal daily routines. We therefore love to look at (and, by looking, perpetuate) the bloodlust in its visceral scenes.
And this blood is a strong metaphor – for ritual, religion, anger, pain, sin, death, lust. This is why these images can be exhibited in SPACE and not just on some cheap magazine rack in a rural corner store. These same themes resonate throughout millennia of art history and throughout culture, itself. The men in Rosensteel’s pictures are therefore not individuals, they are our living archetypes: the Hun, the hunter, and the hunted. The blood is yet a signal that something has happened, that somebody’s going down. In these pictures, the complex, messy dimensions of contemporary personhood (living amid technology) are whittled down into hardcore terms, concretized into the binary world of brutish winners and wounded losers. The strong, deep colors and flat space of these photographs cause an immediate, snap shot feel, and the meaning of these pictures lives in this pictorial immediacy. In witnessing this split-second directness of facial ferocity, I am not wondering much other than who’s going to win, because he will become thelaurelled winner, heralded.
These photographs are not even about pain or fear. It’s true that tyranny is evident; these men are dominating and being dominated, even cowering. It’s also true that mixed martial arts is not simple, involving subtle shifts, finesse and cunning that is the crucial subtext to violence, and also difficult to pictorially address. A closer look at Rosensteel’s pictures reveals this engagement and intimacy that is not about violent spectacle or chipper sports photography. It is really the stuff of men; these pictures demonstrate a man interacting with another man on their own terms, in close contact. It is viewing these moments of intimacy that transcend the fight, itself. As Rosensteel posits, “If you punch somebody in the face, and they’ve punched you in the face, then all of a sudden you have a greater understanding of one another.”
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