‘Weird Sports 2,” as one might guess, is the follow-up to Skokie-born, Portland-based photographer Sol Neelman’s first book: “Weird Sports.” It introduces people to ostrich racing, chess boxing, pudding wrestling and, obviously, a Beard & Moustache Championship. Neelman, a former newspaper photographer, now travels the world capturing scenes from “a world where the first rule is have fun, the second rule is don’t take things too seriously and the third rule is to see the first rule.”
This Kickstarter-funded book is filled with photographs that are not only well-framed and intriguing, but are simply fun to look at. One scene shows a crowd of “Walking Dead”-esque runners at the Zombie-Infested 5k in Maryland and is followed up by a man sandboarding in Morocco.
Whether it’s watching contestants at egg Russian roulette in Wales or flaming tetherball in Seattle, it’s hard not to keep a smile on your face while flipping through the pages of “Weird Sports 2.”
Keri Wiginton is the photo editor of Printers Row Journal.
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“Weird Sports 2”
By Sol Neelman, Kehrer Verlag, 112 pages, $40