Dark Horses brings together Norman Mauskopf’s photographs of thoroughbred racing, made over four years at racecourses in the United States and Europe. The locations named by the publisher range from Santa Anita and Saratoga to Chantilly and Epsom. Mauskopf’s subject encompasses both the horses and the people around them: racing appears as a social world as well as an encounter with the animals themselves. Bill Barich contributes an introduction.

The project’s geographical range gives the book a comparative rhythm. A racecourse is a place where preparation, display and competition meet, and the photographs invite attention to the relationships between bodies, spectators and the spaces that bring them together. This is a sustained photographic project rather than coverage of a single race. Its four-year span gives the individual pictures a context larger than any one event, while the sequence allows moments from different tracks to be considered together.

Published by Twin Palms Publishers in September 1988, this hardcover edition measures 14 by 10 inches. The publisher specifies 112 pages and 80 gravure plates, with the photographs reproduced in sheet-fed gravure. The broad horizontal format and black-and-white reproduction establish the physical setting for viewing the work. The plate count describes the illustrations; it is distinct from the extent of the volume as a whole.

For readers of documentary photography, the book offers a focused study of a recognisable public spectacle through Mauskopf’s extended engagement with its surroundings. For a photobook collection, its interest lies in that concentration of subject, the relationship between photographs and Barich’s introduction, and the particular scale of the printed images. Racing supplies the shared setting, but the book leaves room to look beyond the outcome of a contest toward the people, animals and environments that give the sport its character.