 These photos were taken over two days at a recent Sumo wrestling tournament in Tokyo. I'm a big fan of Sumo, and while I'm interested in it as a sport, I'm even more interested in the way it combines "sport" with a certain ritualized ceremony, refined over the course of its 1500-year history.
About the photos presented here, something similar can be said. Rather than "capturing" action, I was more interested in stripping out the action. Most of these bouts are over in a flash, yet in the photos they seem to go on forever. The photos also toy with a misconception about Sumo: that the wrestlers are all flabby behemoths throwing their girth around, when in fact most have a grace and an agility that would make Balanchine proud.
Tech Notes
These photos were shot with a Canon Elan IIE 35mm SLR, using a Sigma 70-300mm zoom lens. B/W stock was either Fuji Neopan-1600 or Kodak T-Max P3200 film. Negatives were scanned on an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner.
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 Recently, after a couple of years shooting digital almost exclusively, I have started to return to the SLR, and in particular, to black and white film. Initially the choice of b/w was motivated by time and economics more than anything else, but there’s something to the tone and texture of the images it produces that I'm finding very appealing, especially with the grainier high-speed films.
Subject wise, of late I've been interested in figuring out how to photograph the Japan I live in, from a point of view not of an open-eyed tourist, yet one that acknowledges that I'm still very much an outsider in this country. In some ways my recent photography has been about not whether this country will accept me, but whether I want to accept it. One of the reasons Sumo appeals to me is that I sense many of it's foreign-born wrestlers are struggling with the same issue.
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