Max Kandhola’s The Aura of Boxing takes the gym, not the ring, as its true subject. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2013, the book examines an enclosed world where boxers train mind and body for the gruelling challenges of the ring, and where the grit of the gym and the unrelenting physical effort it demands matter more than the spectacle of fight night. Across 144 pages, Kandhola attends closely to that atmosphere and to the toll it exacts.

The gym provides the setting, but the book also focuses on three established figures whose trajectories give the project its range: Julius Francis, four-time British Heavyweight and Commonwealth champion, first photographed in 2000 just before his fight with Mike Tyson; Robert McCracken, British Light Middleweight titleholder in 1994 and Commonwealth champion in 1995, described in the publication-era account as Performance Director for the British Olympic team and personal coach to Carl Froch; and Howard ‘Clakka’ Clarke, who fought at Madison Square Garden for the IBF Light Middleweight title, lost, and then won only one of his next seventy fights before retiring in 2007.

The book is introduced by David Scott, a former amateur middleweight with experience of schoolboy, student and white-collar boxing, now a professor at Trinity College Dublin where he also acts as a part-time boxing coach. As a boxing writer he has focused on the aesthetics of the sport, on boxing art and on boxing posters, contributing essays to many UK and European journals. Kandhola is an established UK photographer who has exhibited widely in Europe and the USA; his work is held in collections including Autograph ABP, the Deutsche Bank Collection, Light Work Syracuse New York, the National Media Museum, Bradford, and Birmingham Library. At the time of publication he was Head of Photography at Nottingham Trent University, and this is his fourth book. Nottingham Trent University and Arts Council England supported its publication.

For collectors, the case rests on that concentration: a photographer with sustained access, a coherent subject, and a clear-eyed attention to the gym as a place of preparation rather than triumph.