Yassin

These photographs were taken between 2006 and 2011 and were made on and around circus grounds in London, Madrid and Fuerteventura. They are part of a series of portraits of Yassin El Messoudi and his younger brothers Soffien and Karim who form a troupe of hand-balancing acrobats. I took these inside their trailer and the circus tent when they were training and getting ready for the evening show. Circus life, seemingly suspended in a bygone era, and circus performers as social outsiders have been depicted by gritty documentary photographers, alongside the representation of the circus tent as a site of fantasy by countless fashion photographers. I tried to avoid looking at spectacle and magic as the essence of circus and instead explore how the circus can become a place to observe masculine identities by focusing on the teenage life of its adolescent residents, shaped by dislocation, nonconformity and existence on the fringes of community life.