• Religion and the use of masks

    I spent the evening of Christmas day watching small children play with giant balloons on the main town square of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and realised belatedly what a colossal free gift the ease of visiting Mexico represents for residents of the United States. A stupid thing to say, I know, but until these past few days I had no sense of Mexico's inspiring vastness. It has, for me, exactly the right degree of dépaysement: a foreign language I can just about navigate in print; tropical fruit and decent coffee; mountains; and music everywhere. My new year's resolution tonight will be to learn some Spanish.

    On boxing day I was in a local museum marvelling at photographs of rural Oaxaca, all fairly modern, but which might have been taken at any time in—oooh—the past three hundred years or so, subject to the availability of a camera. Market scenes, hunting, weddings, men in animal masks. These pictures were by Ariel Mendoza Baños, a new name to me, and they delighted me more, I think, than any paintings could have done short of a show by Matisse.

    The best photographers are doubtless geniuses, just as the best painters are. But it is easier to be a satisfying photographer than a satisfying painter: there is much more agreement on what constitutes a very good photograph, and there is more scope for letting the subject do the work.

    In this case, it was the religious and ritualistic photographs that transfixed me. Why do pantheistic and animalistic rellgions always look so much more fun? It can only be the masks. Nobody wearing a stylised leopard's head can look entirely serious, at least in a photograph, however fierce they may think themselves. If anyone has it in mind to start a new Christian sect, I recommend the general use of grotesque masks as an attractive and distinctive feature.  read more »


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