NYAB Event - Keith Price "Children and the Art of the Eight Limbs"

Keith Price "Children and the Art of the Eight Limbs"

Gallery FCB

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The photography of Keith Price explores what lies beneath a story by focusing on the compelling nuance of raw human experience and capturing the building up, and release of, energy in the form of gesture and expression. In his ongoing series covering various aspects of the sport of Muay Thai, Keith is striving to expose the physical manifestations of a fighter's emotional state by using the lens to isolate the subject from the chaotic environment of competitive combat sports.

Muay Thai is the highly brutal and sometimes controversial national sport of Thailand. Muay Thai is often referred to as "The Art of the Eight Limbs", as the hands, shins, elbows, and knees are all used as weapons. In one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world competitive fighting and the money gained from the excessive betting that surrounds it has spawned an estimated sixty-five thousand professional fighters nationally. The relatively large sums of money to be made by prizefighters entices families to send their sons to live at Muay Thai training camps as early as five years old to begin their training as professional fighters. These children train five to six hours a day and by eight or nine years old begin competing in provincial rings throughout Thailand. The images presented in Children and the Art of the Eight Limbs came to fruition during a sponsored trip to Thailand in November 2007 to photograph participants in the Muay Thai World Cup in Bangkok. The unique opportunity to attend a Loy Krathong (River Lantern) festival in Bang Phli brought Keith closer to the problematics of his subject than he had ever been.