Every once in awhile I get sent various materials to my office, such as books for review. About a month ago, I received one that was particularly interesting: BOX: The Face of Boxing, which is a collection of more than 300 portraits featuring various figures from the fight game. It’s a hardcover book that covers almost 200 pages (with text from my colleague Tom Hauser) but the star of the book is the man who shot these pictures, Holger Keifel.
He had all these beautiful- often poignant and revealing- pictures but with nowhere to display them.
“It took me eight years to get them all together. So three years ago was the first time I tried to get them published in a book,” Keifel told Maxboxing a couple of weeks ago. “Well, it didn’t happen. It’s tricky because boxing is just a niche sport, apparently nowadays, and so it’s really hard and the book business is a very risky business. We just couldn’t make it work. They just couldn’t get it together.”More Pics from ‘BOX’
It has been said before that a fighter?s face is a roadmap to their careers. Well, this book is boxing’s version of Rand McNally’s atlas. But what is striking about Keifel?s work is that it is shot exclusively in black-and-white, which is appropriate, given that boxing and its performers are in such a stark black-and-white busines
