Fighting
Around New York’s kickboxing scene.
Photographs of the concentration, intimacy, and recovery around combat-sport tournaments.
- Period
- c. 2013
- Status
- Complete / Archived
- Form
- Black-and-white photographic series
The project
Twenty color photographs made during repeated trips to combat-sport tournaments around the New York tri-state area. The series began as an assignment for the online publication Fury, but it stays outside the fights themselves, following rituals of preparation and recovery: waiting under lights, fitting a braided headband, kneeling on the floor, and posing in gloves and headgear.
The assignment sent me to photograph fights, but I became much more interested in the time around them. What I saw was sweetness, intimacy, collaboration, and grace: people helping one another prepare, finding concentration, or coming down afterward. I kept thinking about religious paintings and icons, figures emerging from darkness. I did not see the fighters as saints. I was interested in the sanctified psychological space of focus and preparation.
I returned to tournaments around the tri-state area and almost never photographed the burning-hot center of the sport. The series stayed with the rituals before and after a bout and gradually became a personal project rather than only a magazine assignment.
My role
I created and photographed the series.
Selected credits
- Alexander Porter
- Photographer