Monthly Archive for May, 2009

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Eric Espinosa

Lords Of The Ring

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Emerging Photographer Fund – FINALIST (number five of eleven)

Bert Randolph Sugar, one of the greatest boxing writers, says that “to understand boxing, one must understand its roots. From its beginnings, the sport has resonated with urban ethnicity, drawing its recruits from the tenements, the ghettos, the projects, the barrios, places that offered little chance for the present and even less of a future. Many a troubled and troublesome youngster has embraced the “Sweet Science” as a way out, a social staircase out of the mean streets that formed his limited world, fighting his way, bloody hand over bloody hand, up the ladder of acceptance, the only way he knows: with his fists”.

To penetrate the roots of boxing, I headed to the Queen City, a city rich with boxing history. Cincinnati has produced five world champions, beginning with Freddie Miller in the 1930s, Bud Smith and Ezzard Charles in the 1950s, Pryor and Tony Tubbs in the 1980s and Tim Austin in the 1990s. Those guys were always around – in the gyms, in the media, out in public – and the kids see them and want to emulate them. It becomes part of the culture. Pound for pound, Cincinnati is still today the top producer of high-quality amateur boxers in the country. Cincinnati has placed six fighters on the last four Olympic teams.  No other city can match it during that period.

All the young black fighters from its tough neighborhoods share the same dream: becoming future Olympians and bringing home Cincinnati’s first gold medal. But beyond their dreams of Olympic glory, they are primarily battling their way out of poverty, looking for a way out of the ghetto, hoping one day to get into prize-fighting, the “perfect” passport to fame and acceptance. I was able to penetrate their world and spent long hours with them in the dingy local gyms of the city, watched the daily sparring in sweat, blood and tears. The boy-men of the streets, the young kids who are shadow-boxing their fathers, the more experienced pro boxers that temporarily rise and then often self-destruct, the trainers – all have welcomed me into their lives.

I have tried to capture their souls in these “close” portraits, looking into their eyes straight. As Bob Black kindly wrote to me, I hope that my photographs, these stories gathered, will “provide a doorway through which others can walk through and see them, take them into our homes and our lives and understand that like each of us, they aspire, they aspire and fight and hope and love and attempt to win from this difficult life, a life that is finer than the one we, as adults and as a nation, have bequeathed them”. Boxing reveals the best in these men and boys, the hope, the perseverance, the sacrifices and above all, the dignity. Boxing is a hard way of life. Armed only with their fists and their wits, the boxers I have met in the Queen city proved to be very fine young men.

They are the “Lords of the Ring”.

This essay was started specifically for Road Trips and is now shown on Burn for the first time. My hope is to turn this work into a book to shed some light, from hours of conversations, on the lives and struggles of some of these boxers I have met – from the more famous young pro boxers like Aaron Pryor Jr., son of legendary Hall of Fame boxer Aaron Pryor “The Hawk”, to former Olympians like Ricardo Williams Jr., silver medalist at the Sydney Olympics, and Rau’Shee,  the second fighter ever in U.S. history to compete in back to back Olympics, but also the younger boxers who have yet to make it out of the ranks and are training everyday to follow the footsteps of their boxing idols.

Of course, I want to thank all the boxers and the trainers I have met at the Millvale Recreation Center, Mount Auburn gym and Northside boxing school. All of them have given so much to me and shared private moments of joy and tears during the long hours of training at the gym. Many of them live an unusual life with ups and downs and, in some cases, spent unfortunate time in jail that they regret. Clearly, there is no excuse for serious wrong doing and they all know that, but at the same time, it is important not to judge their acts too quickly when they have been tempted by the street. Most of them are very fine young men, brought up in the wrong neighborhood, without a stable family around them. It would have been easy to judge them from the privileged white suburb outside the city center where I live. In the ghetto, survival already seems an achievement in itself.

Finally, this essay, and eventually the book I hope will soon follow, is dedicated to a young boxer, James Perkins, who is shown in the last photograph. James was shot dead last October … nine bullets … a senseless assassination. I hope the few pictures I was able to take of James doing what he loved best, boxing, will help us remember James’ short life forever, a life cut way too short.

Bio:

Eric Espinosa was born in Marseille, France in 1968.  Eric currently resides in Cincinnati where he works for a large consumer goods company.  Within a few months, he will move back to Europe and settle in Brussels, Belgium.  Eric began to pursue photography in earnest in 2005 after attending a DAH workshop  in Rome and another one few months later in Sicily.  In 2008, Eric was an EPF finalist for street photographs taken in the “Over-the-Rhine” ghetto in Cincinnati.  Over the past year, in parallel with his full-time “day job”, Eric has been working on his first long-term project “Lords of the Ring”.  Currently, Eric is not affiliated with any agency but some of his past work is shown on his website.

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Eric Espinosa

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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Simona Ghizzoni

Aftermath

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Emerging Photographer Fund – FINALIST (number three of eleven)

” These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back.”

Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

2006-2009

Since early 2006, concurrent with my first reportage assignments, I have worked on a personal research project exploring the decay of memories. The following photographs are an abstract from the series titled “Aftermath”.

While originally meaning the welcome first new growth of grass after the cutting of hay, “aftermath” has now commonly come to mean the period following a major event or consequences of that event.

This work explores the aftermath of innocence lost. Growing up means you have to abandon the fantastic world of your childhood where everything is wrapped in a magic halo. When you are a child, the world is alive and humanized – animals, plants, and objects. My photographs are a glance at my childhood fantasies transformed in the aftermath to frozen and eerie visions.

All of these photographs are printed in black and white on cotton rag paper and hand-colored with Ecoline (liquid watercolors).

Bio:

Simona Ghizzoni was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 1977. After studying the classics, she attended the Istituto Superiore di Arti Visive e Fotografia in Padua, where she graduated in 2002. She went on to gain an MA in the history of photography from the University of Bologna in 2007, with a thesis on the history of psychiatric photography.

Since 2005 Ghizzoni has committed herself to reportage and personal research projects, especially concerning the condition of women. In 2006 she was selected for the Reflexions Masterclass, held by photographer Giorgia Fiorio and the curator Gabriel Bauret. In the same year she tied for first prize at the FNAC photo contest, with the work ‘Scars’, an essay on Sarajevo ten years after the end of the war. She took a third place prize from World Press Photo in 2008, a second place magazine feature picture story award at POYi in 2009, and was recently selected as one of 12 photographers to participate in the 16th Annual World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass this fall.

Ghizzoni is based in Rome and represented by Contrasto.

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Simona Ghizzoni