"These are striking photographs that communicate, in the very stillness of their images, the commingled anticipation, apprehension, loneliness, and almost unbearable yearning that is the essence of boxing. Though the boxer works with others in a brightly lighted space, amid a general level of noise, he is really alone - he must face his opponent in the ring alone - and his is a curiously private and meditative art, as these phototgraphs by Christaan Felber so vividly remind us. Here is a portfolio of brilliantly realized "boxing pictures" - memorable faces that already hint at the battering to come; cryptic and heraldic tattoos that suggest the young boxer's kinship with ancient, anonymous ancestors; the wrapped - (bandaged?) - hands and wrists of a young boxer, suggesting both the premeditated violence and the physical peril of the gladiatorial life; moody studies of isolation in cramped quarters that manage to convey the surreal beneath the banal - as if our great American classicist Edward Hopper had extended the range of his painterly subjects to a culture as resolutely non-Caucasion-middle-class as boxing. It's significant that Christaan Felber has chosen not to photograph boxers in the ring, together - as if, in the intensity of preparation for this dangerous yet endlessly fascinating "sport," the boxer is most himself, and most like us." -Joyce Carol Oates
