Bomba

Every February in San Juan de la Vega, men pack homemade explosive into the heads of sledgehammers and swing them at lengths of steel rail; Thomas Prior went and photographed it, and Bomba is what came back.

The Mexican town's festival commemorates a battle four centuries old. Hundreds of local men gather on an empty football field with hammers whose heads carry pockets of potassium chlorate; struck against the rails, they detonate in phosphorous smoke and flying grit. Prior works inside the cloud rather than at a safe remove, and the pictures hold their subjects still inside enormous motion — figures half-dissolved in smoke, arms raised, nearer the composition of history painting than of reportage. Self-published in 2016 in a signed edition of 250: 52 pages, 23 colour plates, no essay or accompanying text, bound in natural linen with a hammer blind-embossed on the front board, 10 x 12 inches. It was launched through Dashwood Books in New York.

Prior is a New York photographer whose editorial work has run in The New Yorker, Time, Vogue and Avaunt, and whose personal projects turn on athletes in motion and on landscapes altered by human intervention. Bomba was his first book; Amen Break followed from Loose Joints in 2020, and Slip Me the Master Key after it.