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Want to know what the future of combat sports looks like? Flipping through the pages of Fighter: The Fighters of the UFC, one has to wonder if the answering isn’t staring back at you.

Depending upon your perspective, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, aka the UFC, is brash, beautiful, or brutal — and as in your face as the fighter’s blows. Fighters take down their opponents with an arsenal of moves, using a unique blend of martial arts, including jujitsu, wrestling, judo, and kickboxing.

In Fighter: The Fighters of the UFC, Reed Krakoff offers a unique look at these world-class athletes in a startling collection of black- and-white photographs. Krakoff, the president and executive creative director of Coach, a leading force in the fashion world, is also an accomplished photographer and a huge UFC fan. His pictures, shot with a medium-format Mamiya box camera, depict these fighters as they are rarely seen. Standing alone, without competitors or an audience, Krakoff’s subjects look gentle, warm, humble, and disarmed. But with their signature tattoos and resilient bodies, it’s also clear that they are built for the cage.

The book features some of the biggest names in the UFC – iconic fighters such as Chuck Liddell, Georges St-Pierre, and Matt Serra pose for the camera in ways that are real and revealing. Accompanying these shots are brief interviews that offer another perspective on these modern-day gladiators.

Buy Fighter: The Fighters of the UFC from Amazon.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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If you’re a UFC nut like me, the other book to get is Octagon by UFC photographer, Kevin Lynch. He’s the guy you see hanging over the cage snapping pictures during the fights. This coffee table sized book was released after the giant and very limited $3k book was released. In many instances, Kevin photographs the fighters before and after a fight so that you can see the damage that these fighters take.

This is quite an extraordinarily visual guide into the very hearts and souls of those very same fighters who graciously permitted their photographs to be taken not only in moments of great triumph and glory, but also in those times of despair and defeat, which, in my opinion, makes for some truly defining moments in the individual being photographed and also the photographer, who captured some pretty amazing moments on film. 

 
Buy Octagon (Ultimate Fighting Championship) $27 from Amazon.