I am no fan of boxing, one of the most elementally brutal spectator sports, but every once in a while it does spawn something approaching poetry: F.X. Toole's short stories, John Huston's film Fat City, and now Nicolai Howalt's series of photographs of young boxers in Denmark. Taken directly before and after the boys' bouts, the pictures reveal striking physical changes like sweat-soaked hair and smeared blood but also less obvious shifts in the fighters' facial expressions. Author AL Kennedy writes quite movingly about what she perceives in Howalt's photos:
I can only say what I see. And somehow I am only half-surprised that
the first pictures show me boys and the second not men - that would be
inaccurate - but adults. Between the two exposures, in their own ways,
these faces have learned a lesson of reality: that it is full of
physics, torsion, contrecoups, nerves and bones, velocities and meat.
They have learned they are meat, fallible and apt to die. Bad things
will happen - even in victory - and they will be unstoppable. These are
unbearable things to know and yet we should know them, because they are
true. The signs of these hurts are how we recognise each other: that
we're grown- ups, have a human nature. And we can decide whether our
hurts make us predators, or victims, or something beyond those limits -
compassionate.
Kennedy seems to me the perfect person to elucidate these feelings, as her novel Paradise similarly created unlikely beauty for me in the midst of something inherently ugly, in that case alcoholism instead of boxing. And even as Howalt's images hit me in the stomach, I am compelled to look, and look again. You can see a selection in the gallery here.
