“We don’t know how the Spirit works, but events like this point us to a higher reality,” he said, noting that even non-Catholics walk by and linger. ![]() “She’s telling us,” Gomez said, “not to lose faith.”įather Cordero doesn’t call what’s in front of his rectory an apparition but a “sign” of something bigger. Briseida Gomez keeps a dried rose in her office that she once grabbed from the puddle. She said people already attribute miracles to this Guadalupe - arthritis cured, citizenship applications granted, bills magically paid. Leticia Suarez, 48, lives down the street and tends to the flowers left outside on a daily basis. It is making them aware of how much they want to believe.The church’s two official, larger Guadalupe shrines - a statue near the confessional booths, and a fountain in the back - look lonely by comparison. “The trick,” Muniz says in a 2000 interview, “is not getting people to believe. And whether you choose to see the photo, the image, or the chocolate, the true subject matter is the alchemical play of symbols among them. Whether the salt-stain Madonna was real or a hoax, what matters is that it brought together hundreds of strangers, and brought together hundreds of thousands through the ethereal media of television and internet. His works are so hybridized, so unexpected, that after all their lofty theoretical implications, they finally return us to seeing in an inquisitive, childlike way. He is a self-professed devotee of Harry Houdini, and loves to mystify and confound, but it is always tempered with an underlying benevolence, a healthy dose of humor, and a good-natured love of the humaneness involved in picture-making. By focusing on the photographers themselves, Photo Op deflects that desire in order to draw attention to it. It suggests that the act of making an image, or taking a picture, is intimately linked with the desire to possess the subject. Which is the “real” image? What exactly are we looking at? A drawing, a photo, a riddle of some kind? Then there is the psychological tension between the zealous, bustling mass of photographers and the sensual, alluring connotations of chocolate. Photo Op’s three-pointed tension between the “original” reproduced image, the artist’s reproduction in chocolate, and the photographic reproduction we see on the wall in front of us is the first slippery step into a semiotic hall of mirrors. But a closer consideration of his methods reveals layers of meaning that go far beyond mere gimmickry. It takes a while to get over Muniz’s sheer technical virtuosity and the novelty of his materials. The clarity of the photograph perfectly translates the decadence surface of the original drawing. As you move closer and closer, the faces and gestures dissolve into daubs of sweet, glistening chocolate syrup. But there is a threshold of scale at which the image disappears and the materials emerge. They strain and elbow each other, vying for the prize-winning shot. I am struck by Muniz’s sly caricature of each individual photographer, a characteristically self-effacing jibe (he also produced a chocolate image of Pollock in the act of dripping paint). Its ostensible subject matter is a group of paparazzi clamoring to snap a photo of some unseen event. Photo Op begs us to investigate it from these different angles.
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