We asked Max Colson, a London-based photographer and documentary-filmmaker, to share Fight Scene – his 2010 work on the UK’s boxing and cage-fighting cultures.
If your experience of fighting sports like boxing and cage fighting has at some point included ‘OMG!! Brutal MMA Face-Kick Knock Out!!!!’ YouTube clips, you may understandably feel that these activities don’t merit much attention beyond such gratuitous clips. Yet behind the absurdly tagged YouTube compilations and the misdemeanours of clearly damaged characters, the reality of these sports is rather different.
While Fight Scene wasn’t set up with the aim of explicitly challenging any particular stereotypes, it is very much a celebration of young fighters from London as they tread their way to the ring. Starting as a timid pitch to the kind blokes at London’s premier MMA (Mixed Martial Art) gym, The London Shoot Fighters, in late 2008 the project broadened its view to covering the participants of boxing events in London. In doing so the project has gone from photographing participants as they relentlessly condition themselves to documenting the theatre of the main event itself. It makes a simple point; goddamn, these guys are dedicated.
Instead of emphasising any single moment in the fighters’ experience, the project documents the process behind commercial fighting events and the minds of the men who participate. Yet, as might be suggested from the title, Fight Scene is never an intimate story. Taking its stylistic cues from the black and white reportage style favoured by the Magnum photo-agency old school, the photographs offer a detached fly-on-the-wall aesthetic that reflects the often impersonal nature of the events themselves.
The trials and tribulations of Rocky and his life may tell a heart-warming story on the silver screen, but fight nights in London are less about the fortunes of a chosen few and more about a gamble on a cast of many; it is not uncommon to have around 24 fighters passing in and out of the ropes on a single saturday night. Reflecting this reality, rather than pinning its focus onto the lives of a carefully selected elite, Fight Scene takes a look at the look at the process from the alternative angle; a momentary glimpse into the careers of many.