Tuesday, September 26

 

Luke Smalley not Tad Smalley

Today's photo was taken by Luke Smalley not of Tad Smalley, who we all know and love, but there may be some resembelence; well maybe it's only the medicine ball.
"Luke Smalley is a Pennsylvania-based photographer whose subject in his first solo exhibition and book are male high school athletes. Smalley’s work is not the stuff of celebratory small town photojournalism but rather an elaborately crafted and posed body of photos whose participants, though real athletes (Smalley found them in various Pennsylvania and Ohio high schools), act out a series of scenarios using antique athletic equipment, much of it fashioned by Smalley himself. The premise of the project is outlined in an uncredited text at the beginning of the book version of Gymnasium, which extols the idealized athletic boy at the expense of angst-ridden, academics-obsessed adolescents who spend far too many hours brooding in their rooms. “It is the boys who have snap and vim and energy, who have a plentiful supply of ‘ginger,’” Smalley quotes (or writes himself, in which case his text is a masterful recreation of what might be called the Boy Scout Handbook aesthetic), “that accomplish results of importance...The boy who wants to be strong and rugged, who wishes to grow up into a superb, manly man, and who uses his surplus energies and wholesome games and in a temperate amount of study, will avoid without the slightest effort all that is evil.” This is an excerpt from Richard Turnbull's reveiw of Smalley's book "Gymnasium", in other word I stole it. By the way today's workout went well. Bruce & Stephen worked with Paul's Purple Ball and Craig and Robert use the old black 4kg ball. We all had a plentiful supply of ‘ginger’.

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