Look Inside James Shuler Boxing Gym at Gershman Y with Jano Cohen

The Denizen Recommends: A Close Look Inside James Shuler Memorial Battle Gym

Photographer Jano Cohen's exhibit at the Gershman Y will also raise funds for the West Philly gym

Jan. 25, 2017

Lensman Jano Cohen, if she thought about information technology at all, had ever considered boxing to be a sport that glorified much that she disdains—violence and brutality and acrimony. She establish information technology incomprehensible for two people to trounce each other senseless in front of a crowd of onlookers. "Hit each other then hard like that," Cohen says, "doesn't speak kindness to me."

And then it was with some trepidation that Cohen establish herself, in November 2015, with her photographic camera, at West Philadelphia'due south James Shuler Boxing gym; and it is with some wonder that she found herself returning, for more a year, to photograph the boxers, learning to admire their physicality and joy, their contest and sweat—and even, in a way, to admire the sport of boxing itself. "There is," Cohen says, "real beauty in their movement. I love to lookout man that."

On Thursday, the Gershman Y is opening an exhibit of Cohen's black and white photographs from Shuler, as part of a six week-long showing of her latest work. The opening dark party is likewise a fundraiser for the gym, which runs afterward school programs for children, also as adult preparation. Cohen is selling 8 x 10 prints of her boxing photos for a $100 donation to the gym; the gym's owner will be there, besides.

Cohen's journeying to Shuler began with an assignment: An art gallery in Chester where Cohen has shown her work asked her to donate some boxing-related photographs to a charity event supporting a Chester boxing gym, Must Fight. Only Cohen didn't accept any battle pictures, or access to whatsoever boxers. So she went online and found Shuler, a gym about 15 minutes from her Main Line home that attracted her, in part, considering the website showed a large painting of a boxer on the gym wall. One afternoon, she drove to the gym, and found its owner, Percy "Buster" Custer, sitting outside. She convinced him to show her around, and then spent the next few hours listening to his story, and that of the gym's namesake, James Shuler.

A national Gilt Gloves light middleweight champion in 1979 and 1980, Shuler was a local hero who trained with his brothers and friends at Joe Frazier's legendary N Philly gym. In 1986, in the run upwards to a professional national title bout, Shuler bought a motorcycle; he was hitting past a truck and died. Custer opened his gym, and named it for his friend, shortly afterward, on a desolate strip of West Philadelphia, near 42nd and Lancaster. The surface area around the gym is still struggling, simply the block where Shuler is located is mostly quiet; next door, Custer opened a day intendance run past his wife. His girl lives above it.

Today the gym is still where some aspiring neighborhood boxers go to train, some with Shuler's brother Marty. It also houses an subsequently school program for children as young as six, keeping them occupied and active; they must maintain practiced grades in schoolhouse to participate. And Cohen says she has seen it filled with men as onetime as seventy, some of them training or just hanging out, trading stories. "I didn't have any pictures that first twenty-four hours," Cohen says. "I just listened. And and then I came back."

After the Must Fight show—where Cohen sold a photograph to John DiSanto, who runs phillyboxinghistory.com —Cohen returned to Shuler to keep shooting. "After a few weeks, Buster asked me, 'Why are y'all still here?'" Cohen recalls. "I didn't know. I but started liking information technology."

Since and then, Cohen has become a fixture at Shuler, showing up i to two days a week, in the morning time or evening, to photo and talk and soak in the atmosphere. Gone are the days when Cohen would turn away squeamish from a boxing bout; now she gets as shut as she tin to the fighters with her camera, hoping to capture every nuanced action and expression, without interrupting their flow. A longtime dancer who now works every bit a teacher of the Alexander Technique, Cohen has learned to appreciate the grace and agility of battle, the footwork, and the way her subjects agree their frequently injured easily delicately. She has fifty-fifty come to enjoy the matches themselves—or, at least, to capeesh them. "I know boxing is important to these guys," she says. "I  congratulate them when they win, and if they lose, I tell them, 'Well, at to the lowest degree I got some proficient pictures.'" (Cohen is the wife of Citizen chairman and columnist Jeremy Nowak.)

The testify at the Gershman comes at what is probably the midpoint in Cohen'southward relationship to Shuler. Now she has started working on a book about the gym, forth with DiSanto. She is compelled, she says, past all that she has yet to empathize and explore, both culturally and artistically—and by what continually surprises her about battle and those who box.

"They treat each other with such kindness and compassion, both in the ring and just when they're hanging out," Cohen says. "Also competition and animosity. But it was the gentleness I didn't expect."

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Photos by Jano Cohen

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/james-shuler-boxing-gym-gershman-y-jano-cohen/