Lawyer and photographer João Miguel Barros has seen his project, which has as its starting point a boxing match in Macau, take first prize in the non-professional category, Sport, of the International Photography Awards (IPA). Barros intends to return to Ghana to complete the project, this time with a "more humane and intimate" approach to the daily life of boxing protagonist Emmanuel Danso, a boxer pursuing his dream of being champion. Next year the photographer plans to bring his Photo-Scripts exhibition to Macau, which has been on show at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon.
The project, which starts with a boxing match in Macau entitled "Blood, Sweat and Tears", awarded lawyer and photographer João Miguel Barros first prize in the non-professional category, Sport, of the International Photography Awards (IPA) 2018, established in the United States of America. In the non-professional category of the competition, another photographer from Macau, Ka Chon Chiang, came in third place, also with an image from a boxing match.
"This project ends up being an evolution of one of the chapters that is integrated and part of the Photo-Scripts exhibition, which was in the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, until last August," photographer João Miguel Barros explains. This series of photographs of a boxing match had, however, already been distinguished, taking third position in another contest, the Prix de la Photographie, Paris (P × 3), in June. Despite confessing to not liking boxing, the author says he finds the “whole dynamic of the movement of the bodies around the fight very interesting and those images were well captured," he says.
Meanwhile, the photographer hopes to be able to bring the Photo-Scripts exhibition to Macau over Easter next year. Not in its entirety, "but about 95 percent of what was shown at the Berardo Collection Museum because there is no space and because it is not necessary to show all the chapters. Now from October, November onwards we will try to materialize this with the Cultural Institute," Barros says of the plan for next year.
The story of the young ‘boxer’ who lives in Accra
The "Blood, Sweat and Tears" project was first developed on the occasion of the First Annual Art Exhibition between China and the Portuguese-speaking Countries – Aiya, exhibited at Garden House, where more photographs were shown, but "only of the boxing," explains the photographer. Barros had the idea of autotomizing the chapter presented in Photo-Scripts and integrating it into an independent project when he began to feel that there was some "insufficiency in the narrative, and that it was necessary, within the logic of telling a story with some consistency, to go much further than confining myself to the documenting of a fight."
When he learned that one of the boxers, the one who lost the fight, the protagonist of the series of images, was a young boxer from Ghana who lived in Accra, the photographer decided to go to Accra. "I spent almost a week accompanying Emmanuel Omari Danso in his training. In Accra I had the opportunity to visit small academies, where a group of young people usually train in boxing, because the sport has some dimension as a national sport in Ghana," he says.
The photographer says that he was "almost moved", "by the dedicated, simple, honest, humble way with which these young people, in extremely precarious conditions, undertake their daily training with punctuality and dedication. I had the opportunity to witness it all."
With the first trip to Accra, Barros decided to change the narrative. "Initially I thought about building a story from the boxing match with some 'flashes' of training in Accra. But from the experience I had in Accra, I changed the narrative, in the sense of building a story from his training and daily life in Ghana with a few flashes of his coming to Macau, in the logic of building a dream of becoming a great 'boxer' ", In the background, he continues, "this is the narrative of a young man who has this dream, who is African, who has few opportunities, but who, despite everything, trains with this humility, and who one day comes to Macau, pursuing this dream of winning – it was an intercontinental title, which he lost to a Chinese boxer – and returns to Accra and continues to train every day."
The project is already progressing and Barros wants to see if he can complete it by the end of this year. "I could consider it done, but as I'm not happy I wanted to see if I could get stronger images, so I'm going back to Accra in mid-November for about five days to accompany Danso and some serious boxing matches." The photographer returns to Accra "without a pre-conceived script". "I would like to go a little further in the intimacy of Danso, to include more photographs about the personal aspect of his life," he shares.
From urban contemplation to a "more human" approach
With this project João Miguel Barros takes his work in a new direction, from "urban contemplation", to a "more intimate and human" approach. "This ends up being my first essay along this line," he says. The photographer confesses, "I had to start doing this. I have other projects that are more focused on people and less on places or less on contemplation."
Barros says that this has been "a slightly intense process of reflection". "I've been thinking about photography a lot, in different ways, because, apart from photography, I have curated projects. This is an interesting debate to have, which is this confrontation that exists between those who say that a photograph in itself is a story and does not need to be part of a larger set of photographs to be a narrative, or of those who say that photographs have to be part of a narrative."
Photo-Scripts, which groups fourteen ‘short stories’, all independent of each other, "reflects the first idea, that every photograph can be a story. As I think about things and go looking for more works I think that since the two paths or the two options are entirely valid, I think it is deeper and more useful if we can, starting from the image, create narratives and stories".
In his case, João Miguel Barros, who likes writing very much, thinks that it is also important to try to make projects in which the text is associated with the image. "Although not on the same footing of equality and not with the same intensity as the image. That is, the image has to be preponderant, but it will have to be complemented with text. Often, many photography works rely exclusively on an image narrative and on the interpretation that people can make of the sequence of images that was chosen by the photographers," the Barros reflects.
In the case of the project with Ghanaian boxer, Danso, Barros predicts that "it will not include much text, it will have small texts, some ‘short notes’, some short notes throughout the text, but I am very interested in developing some projects of image narrative with text, because I think it makes sense and it’s something that is attracting me a lot, so in future I will also focus on this aspect." This project should be completed with the publication of a book and an exhibition.
