From the photographer who brought you wrestlers, now: sumo wrestlers. Charles Fr ger has supersized his life's work with this large book of larger-format portraits of...substantially larger subjects. And perhaps a larger topic: Sumo wrestling, which dates from the Heian Period, some 1300 years ago, is not just physical combat but also a nexus of religion, history, leisure and athletics. While it has come far from its roots as an offering to the gods, and is known best in Japan as a professional sport, these amateurs display a reverence and a piercing gaze that marks them as preparing for a meditative struggle, a battle of wills and of eye contact as well as body contact. But first, the battle is to get big enough--some of the youngest wrestlers here have hundreds of pounds to go.

Charles Fréger: Rikishi

Arts & Photography

Minato, Chihiro

Mouchel, Didier

Individual Artists

Artimo/POC Editions

"POC"--which stands for "Piece of Cake"--is a group of 21 (at last count) young photographers from across Europe (Helsinki, Rouen, Düsseldorf, Vevey, Arles, Lisbon and London), connected by a shared aesthetic and a groundbreaking workshopping website. Through the nonprofit, artist-funded pocproject.com, created in 2002 by founding member Charles Fréger (Rishiki, 2Nelson, Lux), the members of POC brainstorm and critique as they create. Then, at the same site, they post and sell their works: a new form of structured artistic community and marketplace all in one. The work that this prototype supports riffs on documentary themes, questioning photography as proof or truth. Between miniature ruins, deserted boardwalks, industrial waterfronts, adolescent musicians, battered rugby players and gendarme motorcycle acrobats, the work in Alone Together reminds viewers that imitating nature is the least of art's powers.

Alone Together POC

Photography & Video

Veenman Publishers

The dream of flight is as old as humanity. Icarus dreamt of it, Leonardo da Vinci worked at it, and since the middle of the last century, a select few have been realizing it in outer space. Finnish photographer Janne Lehtinen has also dreamed of defying gravity. His Sacred Bird series presents quietly powerful portraits of the artist about to take off, wearing a range of peculiar apparatuses--standing on a hillside waiting for a breeze to lift a pair of dragonfly-like wings or crouching on a high-dive over a snow-covered lake in what look like the wings from a child's fairy costume--attempts as absurd as they are stirring. Lehtinen's work is complicated by the fact that his father is a well-known glider pilot: these photographs are not just an homage to the myth of flying and to the landscapes to which Lehtinen finds himself tethered, but also an autobiographical investigation.

Janne Lehtinen: Sacred Bird

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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Books by Mouchel, Didier