Flesh Without Theater

Paolo Patrizi is an Italian documentary photographer, and his Sumo Stars project takes him to Japan to photograph wrestlers in the ritual margins rather than the spectacle of competition—the preparation, the stillness, the sheer physical presence of men whose bodies have been engineered into something resembling architecture. What he finds, and what makes the work worth looking at, is that he refuses to exoticize them. He treats the mass as purposeful, the ceremony as serious, and the men themselves with the kind of quiet attention that most photographers abandon when the subject is already visually overwhelming.