“The backstage is more interesting to me.” Photographer Shaun Fenn is reflecting on his recent trip to Argentina where he shot a personal project a few hours outside of Buenos Aires in a rural community known best for its multigenerational involvement in polo. “There’s a whole human element behind the sport of polo. And that—feeling the hay and mud and horse manure and musty wool blankets and leather straps—that’s what draws me.”

When Shaun dove in to do a story on Polo he encountered lots of logistical challenges, challenges which are part of what make the self assigned project interesting. As he explains, the sport itself takes place on a flat, vast, huge field - the size of six American football fields.“You can’t really shoot the match because you literally can’t see most of it as it’s happening,” he says. “The horses are running at mach speed hundreds of yards away. I found myself up against an interesting challenge, but ultimately I wasn’t really interested in that aspect of it anyway. Instead I took my camera and thought, ‘Where are the people? Where’s the sweat? Where’s the dirt? Where do the horses train, where do they sleep?’”

As a result, Fenn found himself comingling with the community on the sidelines, in the stables, and inside a 200-year-old house belonging to a family whose involvement in polo is nearly as old as their home. He saw and photographed the horses and how they live—in utmost luxury, like the premier athletes they are—and observed the many textures of a holistic polo-centric lifestyle. One exemplary activity he shot was bridle weaving. “These people raise cattle on the farm, take the hide, and weave the bridle for the horse,” he explains. “Polo isn’t a sport. It’s a culture that plays a sport. It’s their life.”

Bringing the lifeforce within a cultural activity into an image falls into line with Fenn’s other personal projects, like photographing pond hockey in Minnesota and mariachi in Mexico. “I’ve always been a sports fanatic and a music lover,” says Fenn. “But these days, I really just want to go make some art about the stories around the games or performances. There are plenty of people able to take photos of the action itself, but who’s making the human pictures? If a still photograph can translate the energy of something’s humanity, that's magic. That's the rare air.” Link here to see the series in its entirety.