Two American rituals share a field but rarely a frame. Brian Finke’s 2-4-6-8: American Cheerleaders & Football Players, published by Umbrage Editions in 2003, keeps both in view: the squads on the sideline and the players they are there to support, photographed at high school and college level across the United States.

Finke traveled the country for the project over several years, beginning around 2001. The pictures work close in and mid-action; the exhibition text that accompanied the series describes moments of winning and losing, and the intensity of friendships, rivalries, mentoring and competition. The title comes from a cheer, and the book holds to that chant’s cadence — a seriocomic tour, in the publisher’s phrasing, through pyramids and pom-poms, backbends and tackles, narrated with affection and respect.

The book appeared the same year as Finke’s first New York solo exhibition of the photographs, which is worth pausing over. The material was made for the wall and the page at once, and the sequencing reads less as a portfolio of singles than as an account of how one American weekend produces two kinds of performance: the drilled spectacle of the cheer squad and the drilled collision of the game.

For a collector, the checkable facts are modest and clear: a square hardcover of roughly 26 cm, 128 pages, in English, with contributions listed besides Finke’s photographs, among them Zev Borow. What recommends it is not legend but coherence — an early, sustained study of a subject that sits between sport and portraiture, and a book whose structure argues for looking at the two together.