Ana Busto’s Butterfly Swimmer 2002 at White Box
Eduardo Costa
Ana Busto presented in the Summer Butterfly Swimmer 2002 at White Box. The 8 x 5 Ft, color work is based on a photograph of Jesus Collado, a Spanish swimmer who won a gold medal at the most recent Olympic games in Sydney. Collado faces the audience, looking at the viewers straight in the aye. He wears nothing but shorts, and he has an orthopedic leg. The single work exhibition could be seen from the street at White Box’s window on 26th St in Chelsea.
Busto’s work is part of a series on physically challenged athletes she has worked on since 2001. The idea is great and could produce a group of moving and serious photographs with a rightful place in the history of art photography, and the ability to attract public attention to these athlete’s plight. Unfortunately Ms Busto has elaborated her original photograph with some sort of generic Photoshop manipulation, and Collado’s portrait is presented on two different backgrounds, the original one, and an added background of water. On this additional background, to right and left of Collado, several lines of words describe the swimmer’s Olympic achievement. This is all very distracting, and plays against the wonderful seriousness of the original shot.
Perhaps Ms Busto is trying too hard to make art. She may believe the portrait itself would be “just” documentation, and as she tries to elevate it to the art sphere, she sabotages the unusual potential in the subject matter. As it is, Busto’s work is still relevant because Collado’s extraordinary presence manages to reach the audience through the veil of mediocre graphic art. As to the information in the words, it could have done better on a label.
I hope that, eventually, love for the subjects of her portraits and more confidence in photography will lead Ms Busto to a search for the most simple, honest and direct images. It seems to me that only this way she will reach the art status she wants for her work. In Jesus Collado there is youth, determination, physical beauty, strength, and a vulnerability that seriously represent the human condition. This is more than enough, if captured in a photograph which is left to talk by itself to the audience, to make such a photograph into great art.
