Luke Smalley’s “Gymnasium” presents teenage athletes who appear to belong to some time or place other than the northwestern Pennsylvania towns where the photographer found and photographed them. Though their gaze is immediate and direct and their sensuality familiar, the publisher describes their otherworldly quality as a product of the artist’s unique vision; no telephone or television seems possible in this not-quite-familiar landscape. The photographs resist simple documentary fact, instead inhabiting a space that feels both recognizable and subtly estranged.

Smalley worked on the project over roughly ten years, painstakingly coordinating the creation of the works rather than relying on chance. He often made his own athletic equipment, props, and costumes. Across 139 duotone plates, the book holds to a restrained, deliberate vision of constructed adolescence and athletic ritual, treating its young subjects as inhabitants of a self-contained world.

Twin Palms Publishers issued the volume in March 2001 as a hardcover measuring 8 by 10 inches, with 168 pages and 139 duotone plates. The combination of an extended project and a substantial group of images provides room to consider how repeated attention to people, equipment and setting can form a photographic world.

The relationship between an actual location and an imagined setting gives the book a recurring question. Its subjects can be approached both as individuals from a particular region and as participants in a setting shaped for the camera. Looking at the photographs means considering the presence of those people alongside the artist’s choices about how to show them.