A beautiful portrait of the communities, theatre and blingy pants of South Yorkshire wrestling

Wrestling is arguably as much about showmanship, theatre and people as sport, as the leopard print pants, glitzy props and furrowed-of-brow crowd in Nathan Gibson’s photography prove. Nathan’s series Behind the Golden Curtain is a sensitively shot collection of images taken in Sheffield that convey a number of narratives, both of their subjects and their creator.

It started “as someone else’s project,” in Nathan’s words, when he was making a short film about men working in a Sheffield spring factory with his friends Clive Egginton and Marcus Sarko. “Sadly Clive fell ill before the project was completed and passed away last September, however as winter fell into spring at the beginning of this year I decided to start work on a second film we had been discussing – with the National Community Wrestling Alliance,” Nathan explains. “After an initial visit I was soon returning week after week to their dojo based in the smaller town of Rotherham, just up the road from Sheffield.”

Having got to know the wrestlers, Nathan decided to focus on the photography over filming for now. “I was privileged to discover and be welcomed by a constructive and rewarding community that is characterised by dedication, continual self assessment and incredibly strong personal links and support,” he says.

“The work that goes into their shows is exhaustive and detailed. They don’t just need to be physically fit, but well mentally prepared. That’s before they even start building the back story of their characters, creating their costumes and fostering an ongoing narrative that is complex, fascinating and vital to the promotion of their shows. Anyone who tells you wrestling is fake, or an act, is wrong – this is a sport that is physically and emotionally gruelling and requires a significant amount of self control and creative tenacity.”

This sense of the personal side of wrestling – the fiercely loyal community around it, the family doggedly supporting at the sidelines – that shines through in the images. “It’s perhaps a luxury to let a project develop gradually and organically over time as I have with this, and one of the best things about photography is of course that it regularly brings you into contact with people you’d never have met otherwise. Those personal links and relationships are kind of the point after all I guess.”