Book review

I confess that I approached ‘Boxers’ by Carol Huebner Venezia (an American photographer, the exotic name notwithstanding) with great anticipation. The publicity talked of how the photographer had got inside the psyche of the professionals in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn where many famous fighters had trained. Further, the publicists intoned, she counterbalances the tough end of the sport with pictures of fighters in Italy. I quote:

“Boxing offers those working class men who learn the sport a slim chance of realizing the American dream. But the price for social standing and above-average income is often broken bones and chronic health problems. In contrast, in Assisi, in the center of the Italian boxing world, boxing is about athletic competition and the art of the sport.”

Well, based on what I see here, she never made the remotest emotional contact with her subjects in either location. Indeed, some of the best pictures have no boxers in them – one of a young child in the ring and another of swinging sacks, or whatever you call those things, that boxers pummel. Nary a boxer in sight. Great pictures though.

Despite the high fallutin’ text, based largely in academic drivel, the woman’s inability to get inside the brains (or what’s left of them) of her subjects is mystifying. It’s not as if she didn’t try, as the pictures span over a decade.

Let me quote from the introduction just to reassure you I am not making this up:

“If we look at the group of pictures as a whole, there appears to be a clear impulse to movement both in the single photographs and as a sequence”. What? Nearly every picture in the book is stiffly posed in a pale imitation of August Sander. Sander is much lauded in the introduction let it be said, and the comparison only goes to show the photographer in a negative light.

One of the few snaps with movement is of the swinging medicine (yes, now I recall what they call them) balls in a deserted gym. Why these should be moving when there is no one in sight beats me, but it’s a neat idea, I suppose.

Here’s another Doozie from the intro:

“The objective approach of this photography avoids pathos or any explicit critique of society”.

Please.

So that’s where our higher education monies are going? To pay boobs to write claptrap like that? What a travesty. Time they got a real job and learned to write English.

Lots more of the above garbage is to be found in the introduction. No need to dwell there.

On to the pictures.

There are a scant thirty all told, one of which, the one so badly exposed that no facial details can be discerned, also appears on the cover. Not exactly what you would call value in a $30 paperback. Fully half of these are static portraits, some in what could be a studio setting, of half naked guys who, absent their gloves, could as well be construction workers. Or fit investment bankers, come to think of it. The remaining pictures are generally so irrelevant to the genre that I really wonder why the woman bothered? Maybe she liked to go to Gleason’s for the vicarious pleasure of seeing all those muscles, the camera as an excuse, but the guys in the ring clearly did not accept her as one of their own. Heck, she’s probably the wrong gender and color anyway.

I would like to say something positive about this book. I cannot. I just feel I have been ripped off.

Update May 18, 2009: This book is so unquestionably bad, the photography so regurgitably awful, that I finally consigned my copy to where it belongs. The garbage bin. Good riddance.