Thread: Illinois (Mexinois) sinking fast!

Rough Riders
INTRODUCTION BY DON TERRY
September 30, 2007

FOR MORE THAN 10 YEARS, professional photographer John Booz has spent his summer Sundays at a dirt ring in the shadow of the Cook County Jail or on a 100-acre farm near Lemont, Il, capturing the brutal beauty of Mexican-style bull riding and rodeo.

What makes him return again and again is not the ever-present danger to man and beast but the drama, pageantry and skill of the competitors, like the graceful cowgirls who ride into the ring in their flowing dresses and sombreros, guiding their huge horses with a whisper and a whip through a dusty horseback dance. He comes back for the daring of the cowboys as they jump from one bareback horse racing around the ring to another in the climatic event called Paso de la Muerte--the pass of death.

"It's like being in a foreign country every Sunday," he says.

Mariachi music blasts and, on special occasions, dwarf bullfighters and rodeo comedians are brought in from Mexico. "It's like a Fellini esthetic," Booz says, referring to the late filmmaker who often used circus characters in his work.

Booz also records a harsher side of the spectacle. Through his camera's eye, he has seen horses and calves inadvertently crippled and sometimes killed in the ring. He has watched cowboys rushed to the hospital, bloodied and battered, or mumbling their prayers as a raging bull paws the dirt a few feet away, momentarily distracted by the antics of a clown or the screams of the crowd.

Booz never judges, although he admits animal-rights advocates "have some legitimate complaints." Still, he's a documentary photographer, so he just keeps shooting--thousands and thousands of photos of a world most Chicagoans never see.

Before he started documenting the rodeo, Booz spent his Sundays at the gritty street bazaar that was the old Maxwell Street. After the city shut down the famous market, Booz went looking for another carnival. He found it at the rodeo. "I just fell in love with it."


http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/ ... &cset=true

Interesting considering Europeans reintroduced horses to the Americas. The Spaniard Cortez was one of them. This history of Rodeos are rooted in Asia and Europe.

Dixie