Hiro: Fish & Fowl: Part 2: Fighting Fowl
In the 1980s, as a purely personal project, Hiro photographed dazzling fighting Betta Splendens fish and powerful male game fowl. These photographs, charged with violent movement and high emotion, reveal Hiro’s genius in discovering beauty in the unexpected. In places where one could not imagine finding it. His work is characterised by surprises, abnormalities, unusual lighting, surrealism, and an astounding vision.
The Game Fowl series comprises 26 black and white images. The photographs make an astonishing visual statement of the ferocity of animals. In this body of work, taken over ten years, Hiro marvels at the survival instincts of these creatures. As noted by Susanna Moore in her essay for Fighting Fish/Fighting Birds, the images are reminiscent of early Chinese literati paintings and eighteenth-century Japanese paintings known as the Kano school, particularly paintings by the Buddhist, Jakuchu, who was known for his love of chickens.
The animals react as nature tells them and thus are unreceptive to the photographer’s arrangement. The speed at which the birds engage in their fighting causes them to become indistinguishable from one another in some images. In others, anatomical details like the eyes and feathers become more visible. Before a fight, the animals are particularly magnificent and warrior-like. In their aggression, the birds also demonstrate agility and grace. These cockfights are reminiscent of contact sports, such as boxing, in which human athletes display strength, skill, courage and instinct.
“The photographs are provocative. The emotionless, monochromatic cocks and the sensual fish are emblematic and even illuminating. Nature, in the end, whether it manifests itself in the seductive display of beauty that in the fish is both solemn and gaudy, or in the cold workaday belligerence of the rooster, will always have its way. Nature is unsentimental…so too are these photographs…One does not feel pity or revulsion looking at them, but a kind of humble recognition… We are not the fish. But we are, as are the fighting fish…governed by our own dance of survival.” - Susanna Moore
Hiro, Game Fowl (436-61), Maryland, 1988 © Estate of Y. Hiro Wakabayashi
