Sumo Express is Tomasz Gudzowaty’s tribute to Japan’s national sport sumo, steeped in tradition, ritual and the sacred. Gudzowaty documents not only the wrestlers in the throes of competition, but also their earnest, disciplined lives in the stables where these young men train, eat and sleep together—creating a portrait shaped by both the past and modernity. He confronts his subject with the rebellious, blurred aesthetic of are-bure-bokeh, which defined Provoke, the radical Tokyo photo magazine founded in 1968 in which, Gudzowaty says, “form was reduced to zero and only content remained.” Sumo Express consists of 14 stapled booklets housed in a handmade slipcase, inspired by Keizo Kitajima’s legendary series of books Photo Express: Tokyo, published on the occasion of his exhibition of the same name in Tokyo in 1979.
