ARTICLES

People Who Know It, Love It

Better Than Juan Diego's Version

By Matthew Lickona

1531: The Virgin Mary appears to an Indian convert, Juan Diego, on a hill outside Mexico City and requests that a church be built there in her honor. Diego tells his bishop of the apparition and relates her request. The bishop is skeptical, but when Diego persists, the bishop asks for a sign. The Virgin then directs Juan Diego to gather roses -- blooming out of season -- and to present them to the bishop. Diego gathers the roses into his tilma -- a cactus-cloth peasant cloak. When he opens the tilma before the bishop, the roses spill out onto the floor, and the image of the Virgin is found on the cloth. The apparition is eventually granted the status of a feast throughout North America, and the image, now placed inside the church built in honor of the Virgin, becomes widely venerated. Four hundred years after the apparition, Pope Pius XII says that the image was painted "by brushes that were not of this world."

1921: During the Calles persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico, a bomb explodes on the altar directly below the nearly 400-year-old tilma. According to accounts, when the smoke cleared, the image was miraculously left unscathed, despite considerable damage done to the surrounding area.

1923: Photographer Manuel Ramos takes a highly detailed black-and-white photograph of the Virgin's face.

1929: During the same period of persecution, the image is taken from the basilica and hidden for safekeeping. When it is restored to its place, it has been retouched, possibly due to damage it suffered in transit.

1979: Philip Callahan, a U.S. biophysicist, takes forty infrared photos of the image. Two years later, he concludes that the origin of the original image is "inexplicable." Infrared technology does indicate, however, that the golden rays that surround the Virgin, the flowers in her dress and the stars on her robe have been added to the original image.

1996: A lecturer comes to Mexicali and holds a conference on the Original Face, that is, the face of the Virgin as it appeared before it was retouched. At the conference, he sells copies of the Manuel Ramos photograph. Miguel Vazquez, an engineer, hears about the conference ten days after it takes place and decides he wants a copy of the picture. (He is an avid amateur photographer, and had seen the image years before on the back cover of a book commemorating the Pope's visit to Mexico City in 1990 for the beatification of Juan Diego.) A friend's aunt who had attended the conference lets him use his camera to take a picture of the photograph she had purchased. He scans it into his computer and uses as a screensaver.

A year later, says Vazquez, "I was involved with a business, and it was a fraud. I lost my money, I lost my job, and I had nothing to do. God permitted that. So, in my empty hours, I said to myself, 'I'm going to clean up that image in my computer.'"

Using the Photoshop program, he began removing imperfections. "There was a dark spot between the nose and the left eye; I lightened that. In other times, they painted a crown across the top of her head, and later, they removed it. You can see where it was." It appears as a dark bump on the back of her head, which Vazquez also removed. He minimized the appearance of damage to the underlying cloth and eliminated the white specks that resulted from photo developing procedures at the time.

"I think [Ramos'] technique is very good," admires Vazquez. "You have a lot of detail. But I don't think they could control the image as we do now. The image is very dull; it has no contrasts. Contrasts are attractive." Further, it was impossible to tell where the hair ended and the mantle began. "So, I divided the image into zones, using the Ansel Adams zone system for black and white photography." Adams taught that "photographs have ten zones, from purest white to purest black." Skin, for example, is always Zone Four. "I applied the zone system and transformed [the image] into a perfect black and white photograph." One manifest benefit of the treatment: "You see more light in the face."

He found work at a university while he was still working on the restoration and began nightly four-hour sessions with the image. "It took nine months. As I was progressing, I liked the image more and more. I saw perfect features, a perfect face. It became an obsession." He began adding color, working from the most accurate photographs he could find. He ran some twenty-three skin tones past friends before deciding on a suitable shade. "The skin color has no race." There is no "she's white, or she's black, or she's Latin." Vazquez wanted what he calls "universal skin color."

Vazquez finished nine months after he began, and he was ecstatic with the result. "I said, 'This is a treasure. I want this image to be known by everyone. For me, it is the most important image of the Virgin Mary in the whole world, because God painted it. I recovered it, but that's nothing; God painted it." It seems odd to think of technology -- first photography and then computer manipulation -- as the agent in the recovery of God's handiwork, but there it is.

Vazquez points out the principal differences between his image and the retouched version currently on the tilma: "You see how the cheek is inflated [in the tilma version]? It's because, with the layer of paint, they erased the shadow that makes the cheekbone." Here and elsewhere, the retouchers have, in adding a layer of paint, added a layer of flesh, weighing down the lower half of the face. "In the original, the nose is perfect. Here, we have a longer nose that points a little bit downward," dragged out by a brushstroke beyond its original dimension and curvature. "The lips -- she has a child's mouth. Now the lips are fuller," and the flesh around the mouth more swollen. "See the double chin, how it is marked?" Through the emphasis of a faint shadow, the jaw has been shrunk and the chin doubled. "And the eyes -- they painted the edge and the iris." They also dabbed paint around the eyes, making them appear puffier, more bulging, more heavy-lidded than the original.

Vazquez concludes that Mary looks "older and heavier in general" in the retouched version, and I have to agree. (I had noticed this heaviness before but always chalked it up to the fact that the Virgin was with child. Ultimately, the image is not venerated because of the beauty of the woman represented, but it is hard to deny that Vazquez's image, developed from a pre-retouching photograph, depicts a more beautiful woman -- a woman of startling childlike loveliness. Finally, his version allows the texture of the tilma to shine through in certain areas, such as the hair, which has since been painted solid black. The texture provides a quiet reminder of the image's origin.

As he said, Vazquez felt inspired to share the image with the world. But first, there was the problem of Manuel Ramos' copyright on the original photograph. Here, Providence seemed to be with him. "I studied U.S. copyright law on the Internet, and I found that I could apply for a new copyright as a restoration with additional work if seventy-five years had passed from the previous date. When I finished, it was seventy-five years and four days" from the original 1923 copyright. He applied for and received his copyright.

Vazquez had five thousand prints made in San Diego on heavy stock; he sent copies to Mother Angelica and Pope John Paul II. Both sent acknowledgements; the letter from Birmingham read, "may our dear Lord reward you for the work you've done." If Vazquez were to choose the nature of such a reward, he would most likely ask for a partner to aid in his efforts to share the image he has restored. He currently sells the lithographs, framed or unframed, on his website, www.originalguadalupe.com (at the time of this writing, Vazquez was in the process of changing servers, but he hoped to have the site back up soon). But he has visions of grander things. "People that know it, they love it. There is a family in Mexicali; I think they have bought twenty pictures. They have prayer groups in their home, and they have the picture in their living room. People will say, 'Oh, what a beautiful picture of Our Lady.' 'It's the original face.' They tell the story and people get it. 'How much does it cost?' they ask. The family calls me and says, 'Hey, I need another.' There is no resistance to change; people just see it and say, 'I want it.'

"There are many things we can do -- we can do prayer cards, we can do keychains. But obviously, I cannot do all this alone: production, marketing, distribution. What I'm looking for right now is a strategic alliance, a partnership with a company or religious order or Catholic movement in the U.S.. I have a full-body version [of the Virgin] in my file; I need to produce five thousand lithographs in order for it to be cost-effective. I need an alliance with somebody who can do that. A prayer card that costs ten cents, that's what I'm looking for.

"I'm aware that I cannot do this by myself, but I do know that God wants the original face to be known by people, and to be available. It's a beautiful face; it's not fair that I have thousands of these in a warehouse. There are things that I think are the most important things I have ever done in my life. Looking back, I feel that my hobby as a photographer, my obsession with the image, and the fact that I had a lot of time since I had no work -- many things got together at one point in time."

It has the look of Providence? "Yes."

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