News | Media Contact
For Immediate Release
June 21, 2004
Contact: Lynn McKnight
llm@duke.edu
High resolution images available for download
2004 Lange-Taylor Winners: Katherine
Dunn and Jim Lommasson
2004 Honorable Mention: Corey Takahashi and Teru
Kuwayama
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has awarded
the fourteenth Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize to photographer
Jim Lommasson and writer Katherine Dunn. The $10,000 award is given
annually to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition
of acclaimed American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and
social scientist Paul Taylor.
Lommasson and Dunn’s project, “School of Hard Knocks:
The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms,”
documents the history of classic boxing gyms across the country
and the way their presence in urban communities has changed the
lives of the people who train in them. Most literature on boxing
focuses on competition in the ring and stars of the sport—this
project will take a close look at the countless hours young boxers
spend at gyms with coaches who have volunteered their time to pass
on the “skills, mores, history, and traditions” of boxing.
As these gyms disappear, the oral histories, essays, poems, and
photographs brought together in this documentary will provide a
valuable portrait of this historic American institution: “Each
gym is a shrine to the traditions of the sport.”
“The natural environment for a boxing gym is the poorest,
meanest part of any town. Despite the cruel reputation of the sport,
the gyms are built around a peculiarly generous kindness. All ages,
sizes, races, and genders get equal respect. The violence taught
is ritualized and restricted to formal sparring. Physical gentleness
is the rule in all other interactions. . . . For many, the gym is
the safest place they know,” Lommasson and Dunn write in their
proposal.
“For every boxer who appears on television, thousands are
studying in gyms from coast to coast. The majority of these students
will never be professionals, but their lives are marked and improved
by their time in the gyms. . . . It is a marginal world outside
the tax-supported public schools and well-funded team sports. Students
uncomfortable in the regimen of school or too alienated for teams
find a compelling logic in the disciplines of individual combat.
No law requires students to show up in a boxing gym. They go on
their own time.”
Lommasson’s photographs will include views of the neighborhoods
in which the gyms operate, as well as interior studies of gyms as
“living environments and as archives of boxing history,”
and formal and informal studies of coaches and students. The text
will consist of a montage of interviews with boxers and coaches
and original essays and poems by various writers as well as essays
by Dunn.
Lommasson and Dunn’s work on America’s gyms will be
published as a book of photographs and essays, titled Shadow
Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice, and the Will to Survive in America's Toughest
Boxing Gyms, in spring 2005 by Stone Creek Publications. There
will also be a traveling exhibit.
Jim Lommasson, a freelance photographer based in Portland, Oregon,
has been photographing gyms since 1993. His work has been included
in numerous solo and group shows. His most recent show was “on
the road. revisited” at Gallery Untitled in Portland. He has
received a New York Art Director’s Award and was named Person
of the Year by Media Inc. and the American Marketing Association.
Katherine Dunn is the author of Geek Love, a finalist for
the National Book Award in 1989. She started writing about boxing
in 1980, and her reports on the sport have appeared in such publications
as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Interview, Mother Jones,
Sports Illustrated for Women, and Playboy.
Honorable
Mention
An honorable mention was awarded to writer Corey Takahashi and photographer
Teru Kuwayama for their project “The Return Refugees,”
an in-depth look at the lives of young Cambodian-Americans who have
been deported to Cambodia and are now living in Phnom Penh: “In
2002, under pressure from the United States, the Cambodian government
began accepting the first of an eventual 1,400 or more Cambodians
who’ve been legally residing in America, but who have past
convictions that make them deportable under controversial 1996 changes
in immigration law.”
The Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize was created by the Center
for Documentary Studies to encourage collaboration between documentary
writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer
Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. In 1941
Lange and Taylor published American Exodus, a book that
renders human experience eloquently in text and images and remains
a seminal work in documentary studies. The Lange-Taylor Prize honors
their important collaborative work.
Past winners have included Keith Carter, Donna DeCesare, Luis Rodriguez,
Reagan Louie, River Houston, Ernesto Bazan, Deborah Luster, Rob
Amberg, C. D. Wright, Jason Eskenazi, Dona Ann McAdams, Brad Kessler,
Misty Keasler, and Charles D’Ambrosio.
Media Contact
Kindly direct media inquiries to:
Lynn McKnight
Associate Director for Programs and Communications
Center for Documentary Studies
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705
telephone 919-660-3654
fax 919-681-7600
e-mail: llm@duke.edu
banner image:
Photograph by Christopher Sims
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