Boxer Lisa Moore at Lansbury ABC, East London
Amateur Boxing Club Photography for Sport and Brands
These are portraits of the boxer Lisa Moore, made at Lansbury ABC in Poplar, east London. Lisa won the Haringey Box Cup in 2014 and went on to box for Repton in Bethnal Green, two clubs in the same east London borough. Her route into the sport ran from podium dancing in Ibiza to a place on the England squad, and from there into coaching, which is what she does now. We worked in the club's own gym and ring: hands being wrapped, rope work, pads with her coach, and the painted Lansbury crest filling the wall behind her.
Reshaping My Creative Journey
This shoot changed what I photograph. I had been making lifestyle work I was becoming uncomfortable with, images that fed a narrow idea of how women are meant to look, and an hour in a boxing gym with someone who had no interest in performing made the alternative obvious. So I worked with the room rather than against it. The light stays low and directional, and it is exposed for the cream brick, the red bags and the club's own crest rather than for her face alone, so the gym stays in the picture instead of falling away into black. The gym is half of who she is. It is the in between frames that carry it: a hand taping, boots just off the floor with the rope blurred underneath, a fighter crouched in her own corner looking at nothing.
This sits with my other boxing work: the 40th AOP Awards finalist series, the Haringey Box Cup, the competition Lisa won in 2014, and more boxing photography. I have written about shooting the Box Cup in Feel the Fight of Haringey Box Cup. See the wider sports photography portfolio, or commissions for campaign and brand work.
If you are a brand, a federation or a magazine and you want women in sport photographed as athletes rather than as a look, this is where that started.