Everyone Has A Plan Until They Get Punched In The Mouth

Once a month, in a backyard in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, two people step in to settle a “beef” with their fists, under a strict code, in front of a few witnesses and the organizers’ phone camera. Photographed slowly, the work follows the fighters of Streetbeefs and their neighborhood, asking what honor, masculinity and violence mean in a country founded, in part, on the duel.




Harrisonburg, Virginia, United States. This small town in the Shenandoah Valley is where an uncommon event happens every month. Two people confront each other in a fistfight duel to solve a dispute (informally called a “beef”). The place is a backyard known as “Satan’s Backyard.” The host is Christopher Willmore, aka Scarface. A set of rules, a few people around as witnesses, and the organizers’ cell phone recording everything guarantee the results are “fair” and restore some honor. Alexander Hamilton died in a duel, and Andrew Jackson killed a man in the same manner. The first was a Founding Father, and the latter, the seventh President of the United States of America. Barbara Holland, in her book Gentlemen’s Blood, states: “The duel was essential to private, public, and political life, and those who followed the elaborate codes of procedure were seldom prosecuted and rarely convicted—for, in fact, they were obeying a grand old tradition.”  The book traces that long and often gruesome history of defending one’s honor.

That’s a starting point for a photographic investigation into the exercise of manhood, masculinity, violence as the root of the symbolic order, and other issues that may appear when expanding the view to the neighborhood and the economic and social order they are part of, beyond their own stories.  The work combines on-site photographs, interviews, screen captures from social media groups, and footage recorded by the fighters and organizers.

While I was working on my project Gigantes, photographing Brazilian pro wrestlers, their training, and events, I raised the hypothesis that part of the current lack of interest in this type of sport was in the fact that the spectacle of fights happening today, besides being virtually much more present in front of the spectators, is also more intense, more real, less theatrical (in the sense of following a plot). Once this last type of entertainment becomes a culture, is watched, commented on, and/or perceived only by the masses, the first form of entertainment loses some of its interest.

That’s how I found Streetbeefs. From the comfort of a chair in front of a computer, I came across this YouTube channel where ordinary people fought without technique, but with a lot of desire. At first, the fights involved neighborhood disputes, and without a way to convince each other, they decided a duel would settle it. “Gloves up, guns down” became their motto. A manly and vigorous way to keep rude tongues in check. “For Streetbeefs, the rules are simple: two fighters, three rounds, no biting, no eye-gouging, no throat chops, no cursing, don’t insult the fighters, and no drugs, alcohol, or filming. Whoever wins, they get the honor and the dispute’s solved.” That’s their Code Duelo, in the words of Christopher Willmore, the group's founder. 

I first saw Christopher, best known as Scarface or simply Face, in a short documentary The New York Times produced in 2013, and his story left me breathless. At the age of 5, his house caught on fire. His mom, a drug addict, was drunk. His brother died inside, and for a long time, he felt guilty for not being strong enough to go back inside and save him. At 16, he was “all around drugs and stealing” and got stabbed in the throat. He was sent to prison, where he also learned how to box. On Christmas Eve 2013, one of his friends was shot in the back in front of his house while waiting for his son to leave. He bled there, in front of the child, until his last breath. That was when he decided to start Streetbeefs.

This project treats the Streetbeefs case not as a “simple” fight club, but as something inserted into the Western tradition of defending one’s honor. Nevertheless, it explores other layers that might shape the bigger picture. I call into question the approach/definition of violence as being simply aggression. The French philosopher René Girard would call this demagogic: when we think of aggression, we do not see ourselves as aggressors (whose behavior leads to violent phenomena), and the aggressor is always “the Other”, an unknown far from our responsibility. This, he would continue, perpetuates the Rousseauian idea of a “Good Human Nature”, which would be better off without a society to corrupt it.

My view is closer to Girard’s: violence among men is rivalrous, present in different forms in all societies, and forms the core of human nature and culture.