In my schedule as a photo-journalist there was a simple task: follow the Brazilian Olympic Boxing.
In São Paulo this was the scene: Santo Amaro, south neighborhoods, inside an abandoned club which is now managed by the local city hall administration. At the door, a small sentry-box; Inside, half-painted walls and no left basic structure seen. The warm-up race ground looks urban-ecologic: bushes and grass alongside left-overs from gym equipment and building supplies. After warming-up, the athletes strife within smiles and pushes to get to the slow-flow drinking fountain.
Three weeks later the article was ready. Art Directors and editors were happy but I was not sure I had told the story I saw behind the eyes. That seemed like an off-Broadway two-act theatrical drama from the 80´s: Directed roles, orchestrated speeches and one of the smallest sponsorship benefits for people who weren´t even born in this city, practicing and living far from their native homes but living all together at the same place in this town … everything fitted. I could feel a different aura distant from the daily routine I could document through my lens.
So, I decided to get closer but less noticed with a smaller camera just to blend in and get into the lives of these fighters. I tried to understand what could possibly take somebody out of the certain to the improbable and unexpected. Then, I could feel the pain out of those punches, not only practiced in the dome but also developed daily through drained-out bodies symbiotically working with uncertainty and inquietude.
One of the boxers, a girl who owned her place to the Olympics, after her training and completely wet said to me, “Turn your hands into fists, then some punches are like musical notes: you got a lot of combinations”.
In this dialogue between sweat, tears and dreams, I put my feelings in order to des-construct perfectionism and tell a bit of the story that comes from the pain and the pleasures from lives whose struggles out of violence and dignity is to forge a way to being respected, noticed and, who knows, loved.
With that in mind, the process of capturing images in low-light scenes that demands more pixels, fissures and spots which placed me closer to these people who give and go for a Slap in the face every day early in the morning as breakfast.
