As part of the Cultural Olympiad exploring the connections between art and sports, French photographer Anouk Desury is showing her photo series Les poings ouverts ("Open Fists") at La Piscine museum in Roubaix, northern France.
Desury has been based in Roubaix since 2016, and her photo series is closely linked to the working-class French city.
Roubaix is renowned for its boxing clubs, which trained many fighters who have gone on to reach high levels of competition.
Desury, 28, spent several months documenting the daily lives and training regimes of four young boxers from the town.
RFI met her recently at La Piscine museum.
RFI: Your exhibition begins in the room of the museum dedicated to the history of Roubaix...
Anouk Desury: That's right, the photos are displayed between an enormous fresco of the main square in Roubaix and a stained glass window of Mamadou Ndiaye – a former boxer from the town who is very well known here.
They stand between these two symbols of the city and they are themselves, I think, symbols of what Roubaix is all about. In other words, young people who are passionate, determined and full of dreams.
RFI: What is the link between this photo exhibition and La Piscine museum?
AD: It's really an emblematic place for culture in Roubaix, and also it used to be a swimming pool.
In fact, there are some old-timers here – former boxing club members who came here and hadn't been back since it was turned into a museum, who had known it as a pool.
It's a great source of pride to be able to put them on display them here, as people from Roubaix.
RFI: Two portraits of boxers face each other in the booths on the first floor of La Piscine. Where did the idea come from?
AD: The idea was both to have something intimate on the walls, a bit like what you might see in a boxing changing room, and then, on the two walls facing each other at either end of the cubicle, to have these almost life-size portraits.
Two boxers face each other wearing boxing gloves and standing in a public space.
And then on the walls we discover the smaller formats where we're more in touch with their daily lives.
RFI: Can you tell us about your logbook, which shows how you went about producing this photo series?
AD: This series was produced as part of a major commission by the BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the French National Library).
They wanted to show the backstage workings of photographers and photojournalists.
I've always kept notebooks and I thought that this was an opportunity to have one that was more rigorous than usual.
So, for each report, I wrote a page of notes, recounting a little of the time we'd spent together, the discussions we'd had and our plans for the future. And for each there's a drawing.
It's not just a matter of describing what's in the picture or whatever – it really brings out things about them, about me as a photographer and about the environment and what they're going through in their lives.
Les poings ouverts runs until 29 September 2024 at La Piscine museum in Roubaix.
