Alice Mann’s Drummies takes as its subject a pursuit that many outside South Africa assume belongs to an earlier era. The book accompanies all-female teams of drum majorettes — the “Drummies” of its title — through a long-term photographic engagement with the discipline they practise. Mann photographs the aspirational subculture that forms around these squads, attending to the ways participation is understood by the girls and young women themselves: as privilege, as accomplishment, as evidence of seriousness.

The work is grounded in a historical discontinuity. Drum majorettes took hold in South Africa in the early 1980s, and the sport’s wider presence has since contracted markedly. In contemporary culture it often carries a nostalgic charge, read as the residue of a bygone moment. Mann’s attention falls instead on communities where the discipline is still pursued with rigour, and where its famously demanding training schedules register commitment rather than quaintness.

That combination — an affectionate, locally specific subject and a clear-eyed view of its precarious standing — gives the project its particular weight. Mann’s photographs treat the teams neither as curiosities nor as symbols, but as competitive ensembles whose members measure themselves against exacting standards both on and off the field. The result is a body of work in which style, self-presentation and athletic ambition are inseparable.

GOST Books published the collection in 2021: 128 pages, hardback, clothbound with foil debossing. For collectors drawn to sustained documentary projects about performance, community and the afterlives of a popular form, Drummies is a considered example — a photographer’s long commitment to a subject, given coherent book form.