StreetBeefs began in rural Virginia as one man’s answer to gun violence. Its founder, known as Scarface, had served time and watched drugs and preventable bloodshed take apart the community around him; he started hosting fights and invited anyone to settle a dispute with fists instead of firearms. Brian Finke photographed the club, and the yard where it meets, for five years.

What keeps Backyard Fights from being a curiosity is Finke’s double register. He works in a hyper-realistic manner—bodies, sweat, tattoos, the flat glare of daylight—but lets softer, quieter passages through, and those frames find grace in people who have usually been photographed as problems. Recovering addicts, former prisoners, amateur fighters, teenagers with nothing to do: the book treats the yard as an improvised institution, a place where conflict is staged and contained rather than driven out.

Hat & Beard issued the book in 2024: a square paperback of 124 pages, roughly 26 centimetres across. The shape sits close to the ring itself, level ground with no hierarchy between the two people on it, and the pages are left unadorned so the pictures carry their own weight. Cataloguers file it under photography and the photo-essay, which is fair—this is documentary in the plainest sense, one place followed long enough that its regulars become recognizable.

Finke has spent his career on American subcultures and trades; his earlier books include Flight Attendants, Hip Hop Honeys, U.S. Marshals, Construction and Bike Life. Each depends on his willingness to stay past the first interesting picture. Backyard Fights continues that line, and the anti-gun-violence experiment at its centre has already drawn attention in the New Yorker’s Photo Booth. For a collector of contemporary documentary, the case for the book is not scarcity but completeness: a photographer working at full stretch, over years, on a place that would otherwise have gone unphotographed.