Luke Smalley came to photography by an indirect route: a degree in sports medicine from Pepperdine University, work as a model and personal trainer, and a fascination with the athletic American male as an archetype. That biography informs Exercise at Home, his second photobook, in which he returns to his native Pennsylvania to photograph young athletes in small-town interiors and landscapes. Inspired by early twentieth-century fitness manuals and high school yearbooks, his color photographs combine whimsy with the inexplicable, depicting a world recognizably ours and slightly off.

The photographs stage their subjects with deliberate oddity. Smalley hired a local seamstress to construct a colossal medicine ball; he bound two boys together with a harness and left them in an empty room for a psychological game of tug-of-war; nearby, two others lead donkeys around the floor of a basketball court in a high school gym. Scale, time, and content are altered to create the world Smalley inhabits, and the lush colors of this vision belie the viewer’s sense of dislocation. The project originally appeared as a book in 2007.

Twin Palms Publishers issues the reissue as a 48-page hardcover measuring 8 by 12 inches, published in 2024. It follows Gymnasium, Smalley’s 2002 monograph, revisiting its themes and extending his inquiry into the archetype of the athletic American male.

Read as a group, these situations turn exercise into an imaginative problem. Familiar equipment and settings no longer guarantee a familiar activity, and the athlete’s body becomes part of a scene whose purpose is not immediately clear. A reader can follow the gap between recognizable physical training and the invented tasks. That gap makes the book an exploration of an athletic ideal through staged action, rather than a manual for achieving it.