The Story Behind the Photo - Cock Fight in the D.R. (1992)

Cock Fight, Dominican Republic, 1992. Nikon FM2, 28mm lens, Fujichrome 100 ©Daniel Weber

I'm going to start a new series of photo posts titled, The Story Behind the Photo. This first one is from the Dominican Republic and was taken in 1992. Of course it was shot on film and I used a Nikon FM2 fully manual camera and shot slide film that I had scanned to a Kodak PhotoCD. Each photo I scanned cost me around $10.

Here is the story... I was filming for Maranatha Volunteers International on a 10 week project to build 25 churches in the D.R. My job was to document the building projects, the volunteers and the local culture. I was only 24 years old and Heidi Satelmajer Weber and I had been married for less than 6 months when I left town for 10 weeks to go to the D.R. and take photos. This photo was taken one Sunday in a small village that was below a bridge. We had stopped to take photos and video from the elevated viewpoint on the bridge and looked down and saw a cock fight taking place right below us. We parked our van and made our way to where the fights were being held. As I approached the group I could see that I was the only foreigner there and the "gentlemen" looked like a pretty rough crowd. I quickly slipped my wallet into my front pocket, hoping it would be there when I was going to leave.

I made my way into the mass of bodies watching the fights, and was able to take photos buy manually focusing on a point in the middle of the ring. I had to use a slower shutter speed because of the lower light levels, thus the blur in the photo (which I actually like). The only way to take photos was to raise the camera above my head and shoot without looking through the viewfinder. Now remember this was a film camera and they don't have screens on the back of the camera to help in framing the photo. 

As I was shooting the bodies around me started to push in tighter so that I couldn't move my arms and I was getting crushed by crowd. At that point I felt a hand reach into my left back pocket looking for things to steal. They then moved to the back right pocket, but of course I had moved my valuable belongings to the front pocket on my jeans. I couldn't do anything about the attempted pick pocket or even turn around to see when it was. All I could do was laugh to myself as the thief went away empty handed, while I walked away with a great photo.