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To Be Held By The Earth

I arrived expecting spectacle, but what stayed with me was something much quieter. I was drawn not to the wrestling matches themselves, but to the space surrounding them—where men of all ages moved with a tenderness and emotional openness I had never before seen. Each bout brought on a set of rituals in preparation: oiling each other's bodies, stretching limbs, adjusting clothing, and washing each other clean. The atmosphere carried a kind of collective understanding, that outside of this space, these expressions might be suppressed, but here, it was permissible to feel fully. Vulnerability was not only allowed, but expected; to lose, to cry, to rage, to embrace, to be held.

The environment itself played a role in this grounding. The grass became something to return to amidst the chaos. During moments of wait, many of the boys would fixate on it: twisting blades into knots, wrapping it around their fingers, ripping it out of the ground. These small, repetitive actions felt like ways of regulating themselves, the same way moments of touch between each other found stillness within an overwhelming setting. The oil and the grass bound them together. The ground absorbed, reflected, and returned their presence. Their bodies carried it with them, the grass sticking to their skin, the oil transferring between them in their points of contact. It became a shared surface, a thread connecting each individual to the collective.

Turkish Oil Wrestling is one of the oldest organized sports in the world, with roots reaching back to ancient communities over 4,500 years ago, but the phenomenon I witnessed is a familiar one in almost any sport in any country, which is what led me to photograph and film everything but the wrestling. It felt like these peripheral moments of intimacy revealed something essential and universal. Alongside the tableaus of male softness in the photographs, you can see every action play out in the videos with a slowness that allows us to pay witness to the connection that issued forth from the young men. This work is not about the act of wrestling. It is about what exists around it—the emotional, physical, and psychological spaces that open up when people are allowed to be unguarded with one another.