MARGO JEFFERSON

When William Butler Yeats wrote a short, fierce poem called “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” he was writing about the struggle to make art. But the lines could be written in ink or in blood beneath Martine Barrat’s stoically beautiful photographs of young boxers training at gyms in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the South Bronx. In 1979 a female boxer who needed a promotional picture for her next fight took Ms. Barrat to a gym on 163rd St. in Washington Heights. It had white walls, a red ring bound by red and black ropes and a picture of Rocky Marciano framed in silver-painted wood. Outside the ring stood a 6 year old boy named Carlos Villafane. “He had just patiently bandaged his hands by himself,” Ms. Barrat remembers, “and he was waiting to spar.” 

It was his will that caught and held her; his will, the monastic training he and so many others were willing to undergo; the process by which ambition, anger, and sheer love became the code of ritualized violence called boxing.

The French-born Ms. Barrat had made films for Yves Saint Laurent and video taped gangs. Now she spent her days learning how to move quickly within a narrow space "where jump ropes whirled, punching bags swung heavily, and speed bags cut the air… By night time I felt as if I were a fighter myself, feeling the movement of my legs, holding in my stomach and tightening my butt. Don’t drop that right hand. Give it to him! Double up your jab!” Sometimes she would follow the fighter, the trainer and the cornerman into the ring, then crouch in the corner, hoping no one would tell her to get lost. Usually no one did, so it’s all here in the pictures: the sweat; the neatly bandaged hands and the paw-like gloves; the cool, focused eyes of the trainers, and the focused but much more exposed eyes of the fighters; the anxious weigh-ins, and the coveted gold trophies. After a while, Ms. Barrat writes in a vivid essay that keeps moving between exact observation and passionate (very French) exhortation, she could close her eyes and know who was in the gym by the rhythm of the punches and their breathing. Translated into gestures and expressive faces, this knowledge gives each picture a tempo, a pitch and a claim on us.

At the Paradise Gym, a young man getting ready to spar holds himself with the dashing formality of a 19th century swashbuckler. Floyd Patterson, the former heavy-weight champion, applies Vaseline to the face of his 27-year-old son, Tracy, as if preparing him for a DeMille close up.
In the ring, a small boy called Kid Chocolate after the great Cuban fighter holds up a skinny right arm in triumph after scoring a knockout in the second round. His face takes in the cost of past and future triumphs.There is a boxing photograph in “Phil Stern’s Hollywood,” too: a photograph of John Garfield on the set of the 1947 film “Body and Soul.” The cinematographer James Wong Howe stands nearby, setting up a shot. Garfield, his hair artfully tousled, sits in the ring, flanked by three other men. The fight in this case is an illusion, but the reality it shares with Ms. Barrat’s pictures is a reality of a craft’s being exercised: of men at work in a hermetically sealed space, determined to get it right.

Phil Stern was Life Magazine’s Hollywood photographer from the 1940’s through the 70’s. These pictures must have been great fun when they first appeared in Life, enhanced by the story, the captions and all the information the readers had gleaned from other sources. They would have known all about the gothic feuds between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of “What ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” so when they saw those two sitting at a rehearsal table with scripts in front og them and a blond doll between them, they endowed that picture with all that legend allowed. 

Likewise, a shot of two attractive men at a dinner-dance, looking as if they had nothing but big deals and good times ahead. If the two weren’t Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy at the 1961 Inaugural Ball, we’d turn the page with a nary backward glance. Pictures like this need their natural magazine habitat; they don’t need to be transported to a costly hard-cover environment. The best ones are those that show the concentration and isolation of show business. Anita Ekberg arranging her cleavage, her shapely arm and her cigarette for the lighting man, with a pragmatic, “How about this?” look on her face. George Burns and Eddie Cantor backstage, Mr. Burns adjusting his tie, Mr. Cantor, bare-chested and pale, applying his black-face makeup makeup. Jack Benny and Marilyn Monroe staring into space like mummies at the Shrine Auditorium. Every photographer, it seems, has a story about the picture that got away. During the filming of "True Grit,” Mr.Stern watched a make-up man prepare John Wayne for his closeups “softening the lines in his face, darkening the white and gray hair,” while 15 feet behind Wayne another makeup man did the same thing to his trusty horse, Twinkletoes. Mr. Stern was tempted to take a picture, he writes, “but didn’t dare.”

Ms. Barrat’s resolve gave way when she encountered a 10-year-old, hitherto undefeated, who had lost his first fight. The boy, Gabriel Bracero, left the ring with his father and trainer, a white towel over his head and a white silk robe over his shoulders. “Tears were running down his face,” she writes, “I couldn’t take the picture.” I don’t regret its absence because the pictures she did take give off the same kind of intensity and vulnerability. But when I look at Mr. Stern’s pictures of John Wayne, predictably hunky and laconic, I regret his scruples. There’s nothing wrong with bypassing what’s difficult and settling for the easy charm of what’s familiar, but why not settle for it that’s half the sise, and half the price of this one?