Bruce Gilden

One Night Only

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Description

An extract from Mick Brown's article 'Rough Diamonds':

"For an hour you could feel the tension winding up in the hall like tape on a spool, fuelled by lager and bravado, and at eight o’clock, when the lights went down, it was as if someone had hit the pause button. Plunged into momentary darkness, the hall held its collective breath.‘Fighting’ Brian McCue, a small man in baggy shorts, the upper half of his body covered in tattoos, removed the gown embroidered with the words ‘Charlie’s Bar’, and rested against the ropes as if in a trance, while a little man in a black trilby hat jabbered kill-him stuff in his ear.McCue had travelled down from Blackpool that morning in a rented Ford Orion witli four friends. He is 32 years old, 5ft 4in, and was once, he tells you with some pride, the smallest professional heavyweight in Britain.This is in the past tense, not because anybody smaller has come along in the meantime, but because Brian is no longer professional. Nowadays he works as a nightclub doorman. in Blackpool. The money he will earn tonight is something extra. His opponent, Michael Taylor, 35, from Woolwich, south London, is a nightclub doorman too. He is also a scrap metal merchant, and sometime professional strip-o-gram (policemen and ‘Chippendales’ a speciality), who says he will fight ‘anyone, anywhere’ for the money. Michael is dead straight about this. ‘I ain’t that good a fighter, but I make it hard for those that are.’

One Night Only by Bruce Gilden is an unfiltered and unflinching portrait of an illegal boxing club in Kent, England, photographed over the course of one night in 1994. Inside a smoky, makeshift venue packed with spectators, fighters, bookies, and promoters, Gilden captures the charged atmosphere with his trademark flash—isolating clenched jaws, bloodied faces, and sweat-drenched tension in stark detail.

Far from the polished world of professional sport, the book reveals a brutal, underground scene fueled by adrenaline, desperation, and spectacle. With each frame, Gilden exposes the grit and theater of bare-knuckle boxing culture, offering a powerful glimpse into a subculture that thrived on the edge of legality and out of public view.

Specification

First edition
Publisher: Setanta
Publication Year: 2023
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 72
Size: 8.7 x 11 inches (220 x 280 mm)

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Bruce Gilden

Bruce Gilden is one of the most iconic street photographers of our time. Known for his graphic and often confrontational close-ups made using flash, his images have a degree of intimacy and directness that have become a signature in his work. Though he cut his teeth on the sidewalks of New York City where he grew up, he has since made significant bodies of work in Haiti, Japan, Moscow, France, Ireland and India. Since the seventies, his work has been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world.

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