Shadow Boxers

Shadow Boxers is a celebration of arguably the last great era of club boxing in New York. The world of real-life Rockys, a hard masculine world where any man had a chance to fight his way to fame, fortune and glory. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s John Cole spent over five years in New York’s and New Jersey’s seedy gyms and boxing venues, documenting characters with bashed-in noses and unshakeable dreams, an era that no longer exists but which Cole’s photographs capture for posterity.