FanShot

Boxers and Ballerinas

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An exhibition in New York of photographer John Goodman's black & white images. From the New York Review of Books article (check that link for some photos): "In his essay accompanying the exhibition’s catalog, The Times Square Gym, the journalist Pete Hamill explains that the "mysterious quality" that motivates boxers is not merely "courage," but rather "the willingness to endure punishment in order to inflict it." Dancers, likewise, "endure punishment" in order to create beauty. Goodman’s photographs capture both dancers and boxers stretching, crouching, gazing exhausted into space, fixing shoes and gloves—those respective curiosities that both protect their wearers at their crucial points of contact, while enabling them to blast through the barriers of gravity, of flesh, in their momentary spurts of exertion."