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Pawn and Suffering

Mid-match portraits from international chess tournaments capture the intensity of the game.

As a boy in Spain, photographer David Llada remembers being captivated by a 1987 newspaper photo of Russian grandmasters Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov facing off in the World Chess Championship. “Two grown men, playing a mysterious game, with those little figures carved in wood?” he recalls thinking. “That seemed interesting.”

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    A few days later, a teacher at Llada’s school taught him some basic chess moves, sparking a lifelong passion for the game that has persisted throughout stints as a journalist, author, entrepreneur—and, most recently, photographer.
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    About five years ago, he began traveling the world to shoot chess tournaments, and was soon hired to help them get publicity. Since then, he has photographed tournaments across the world, capturing intimate portraits of chess players of every age and nationality.
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    Llada has included over a hundred of his portraits in his new book *The Thinkers*, which was published in early January.
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    Although chess might not appear the most exciting sport to the average viewer, Llada captures the game’s intensity through the often tortured faces of its players.
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    At first, he was only allowed to take photos for the first five or ten minutes of a match, but he’s been able to convince most organizers to let him shoot for the full duration. After all, he says, “if Federer can be photographed when serving for a match point in Wimbledon, why can’t chess players players?”
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    “You spend five or six hours ‘fighting’ with someone, but you can’t touch, you can’t talk, you can barely move,” Llada says. “All that pent-up tension can be felt by the observer, and I thought it could be captured, too.”

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