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Barcelona snubs prize-winning bullfighter photo

Barcelona's town hall has turned its nose up at a decision by the city's Centre of Contemporary Culture to use a photograph of a one-eyed bullfighter to promote an exhibition of the images from the World Press Photo 2013 contest.

Published: 16 October 2013 10:18 CEST

Barcelona snubs prize-winning bullfighter photo

Spanish bullfighter Juan José Padilla lost an eye after being gored by a bull in 2011. Photo: Jorge Guerrero/AFP

The photo, Bullfighter's Comeback by Spain's Daniel Ochoa de Olza, portrays Spanish bullfighter Juan José Padilla with a patch over one eye.

Padilla, also known as the 'Cyclone of Jerez' lost sight in that eye and suffered paralysis to part of his face after a goring by a bull in 2011.

The 38-year-old needed major reconstructive surgery and a titanium plate implant.

Madrid-based de Olza's portrait shows Padilla on the day of his return to the ring five months later.

After the comeback fight, he was lifted and carried from the ring by one of his fellow bullfighters — an honour reserved for only the best performers.

A section of de Olza's prize-winning portrait of Spanish bullfighter Juan José Padilla. Photo courtesy of World Press Photo.

de Olza, originally from Pamplona, won second prize in the Observed Portraits section of the World Press Photo competition for the image.

There is no blood, and no animals are visible, but Barcelona's town hall doesn't want the portrait on the promotional banners that hang from the city's lamp posts.

"We give up this space for free so that events can be promoted which match with the values of our 'Barcelona Inspires' campaign,'" a spokesperson for the city's town hall told Spanish news agency Efe.

The town hall has voiced instead its preference to a black and white portrait of an unemployed person by Dutch photographer Ananda van der Pluijm.

"This is not a veto," the Barcelona town hall spokesperson stressed.

"We wanted to see more options and choose the one that suited us the most and matched the values of Barcelona Inspires.

"This one (by the Dutch photographer) seemed better and that's why we will use it."

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French MP abandons bid to ban bullfighting

The 577-seat National Assembly had looked set to vote on draft legislation that would have made the practice illegal.

But the MP behind the bill withdrew it after lawmakers filed more than 500 amendments, many of them designed to take up parliamentary time and obstruct the vote.

“I’m so sorry,” Aymeric Caron, a La France insoumise (LFI) MP and animal rights’ campaigner, told the national assembly as he announced the decision in raucous and bad-tempered scenes.

Though public opinion is firmly in favour of outlawing the practice, the bill had already been expected to be rejected by a majority of lawmakers who
are wary about stirring up the bullfighting heartlands in the south of the country.

“We need to go towards a conciliation, an exchange,” President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday, adding that he did not expect the draft law to pass. “From where I am sitting, this is not a current priority.”

His government has urged members of the ruling centrist coalition not to support the text from the opposition LFI, even though many members are known to personally favour it.

During a first debate of the parliament’s law commission last week, a majority voted against the proposal by Caron, who denounced the “barbarism” of a tradition that was imported from Spain in the 1850s.

“Caron has antagonised people instead of trying to smooth it over,” a lawmaker from Macron’s party told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The bill proposed modifying an existing law penalising animal cruelty to remove exemptions for bullfights that can be shown to be “uninterrupted local
traditions”.

These are granted in towns such as Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan in south west France and along the Mediterranean coast including Arles, Beziers and Nîmes.

Around 1,000 bulls are killed each year in France, according to the Observatoire National des Cultures Taurines.

READ ALSO EXPLAINED: Could bullfighting finally be banned in France?

Many so-called “bull towns” depend on the shows for tourism and see the culture of bull-breeding and the spectacle of the fight as part of their way of life – idolised by artists from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso.

They organised demonstrations last Saturday, while animal rights protesters gathered in Paris – highlighting the north-south and rural-versus-Paris divide at the heart of the debate.

“Caron, in a very moralising tone, wants to explain to us, from Paris, what is good or bad in the south,” the mayor of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, told AFP recently.

Other defenders of “la Corrida” in France view the focus on the sport as hypocritical when factory farms and industrial slaughter houses are overlooked.

“These animals die too and we don’t talk enough about it,” said Dalia Navarro, who formed the pro-bullfighting group Les Andalouses in southern Arles.

Modern society “has more and more difficulty in accepting seeing death. But la Corrida tackles death, which is often a taboo subject,” she told AFP.

Previous judicial attempts to outlaw bullfighting have repeatedly failed, with courts routinely rejecting lawsuits lodged by animal rights activists, most recently in July 2021 in Nîmes.

The debate in France about the ethics of killing animals for entertainment is echoed in other countries with bullfighting histories, including Spain and Portugal as well as Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.

In June, a judge in Mexico City ordered an indefinite suspension of bullfighting in the capital’s historic bullring, the largest in the world.

The first bullfight took place in France in 1853 in Bayonne to honour Eugenie de Montijo, the Spanish wife of Napoleon III.

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