A training room and boxing ring is tucked away in a corner of the George Bell Arena, Toronto. A few hundred people cram in and watch top Ontario amateur and emerging pro boxers fight three rounds. It all feels like boxing should. Not the big show, but rough, raw, physical and very close. Young men and women, sweating, determined use their hard trained steel muscles to drive padded gloves into their opponents face, head and body, just as hard as they can. A fighter closed in the ring, nowhere to escape what's coming, has to find in themselves, even at the point of exhaustion, still find the strength to aggressively attack the other fighter and defend against the other fighter's aggression and relentless attacks. The fighters move around each other, testing, tempting, waiting for a moment of weakness or distracted thought or lack of skill to pounce on it, to hit hard again and again. You find yourself if you're a boxer. You can't escape yourself. It's all you have to live by in that ring. It's just you, and the one coming after you.

Photography freezes this emotion - the fear, the threat, the pain, the courage- freezes what one may miss with the speed of action. We look at boxing and look at these photos perhaps because something resonates in us from our reptilian brain, facing dread, drawing on every drop of strength to face a foe. We see ourselves, in a ring of life, facing our fear. Sometimes the opponent we face is ourself. Sometimes it's our circumstances. Whatever the challenge, we have no choice but to stare it down, win or lose. We might try to escape, but in the end there is nowhere to escape . That's life. Life is a beautiful thing for all its roughness, its raw edge. Much more beautiful than safe or soft.

From this event, I went to shoot an evening of dancing the Argentine Tango. Have a look at those pictures because I think they're about the same thing as these: our lives and what we make of them.