NEWS

Luke Smalley’s Exercise at Home Reissued by Twin Palms

The second edition of Luke Smalley’s monograph Exercise at Home, published by Twin Palms is now available.

In Exercise at Home, now reissued after being out of print since 2007, Smalley returns to his native Pennsylvania to consider the small-town interiors and landscapes that are the settings for his portraits of young athletes. Color photographs, inspired by a more innocent era, combine whimsy with the inexplicable.

Smalley hires a local seamstress to construct a colossal medicine ball; he binds two boys together with a “harness” and leaves them in an empty room for a psychological game of tug-of-war, while somewhere 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. The lush colors of this new vision belie the viewer’s sense of dislocation.