



1 / 9 Chevron Chevron Thomas Prior

Men in the Mexican town of San Juan de la Vega were having trouble with their sledgehammers. The heads were tearing off—because they were loading them with homemade explosives and slamming them against I-beams. The practice is part of the tradition at the heart of the town’s annual festival in honor of its patron, St. John the Baptist. According to Dudley Althaus, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, the story goes that Juan de la Vega, a wealthy miner and rancher, and the town’s namesake, was aided by the saint in recovering gold stolen by bandits. Residents took up exploding sledgehammers to commemorate the victory over the outlaws. And so, on Fat Tuesday, in a field in the middle of the town, packets of fertilizer and sulfur explode into clouds of dust and shrapnel. Now the tools are reinforced with rebar, and the celebration features fabulous blasts but few flying hammer heads.

This past February, the American photographer Thomas Prior was at the festival, wearing layered pants and jackets, a helmet, and goggles, running toward the blasts with his cameras. Prior, who has photographed bull riding in Arizona and the Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico, is attracted to dangerous recreation. His photographs from San Juan de la Vega, which are collected in a new book called “Bomba,” leave the festival’s history out of the picture. Walls of smoke obstruct any sign of the town or the crowds that gather to watch; we don’t see the faces of the men holding the hammers, just their smoke-shrouded bodies bent on waves of impact. The impression is one of figures hurled back by some cataclysmic disaster. When I spoke with Prior, he showed me a picture of his arms from the day of the festival. They were pocked all over with tiny, bleeding cuts. He told me about a man who was rushed away after a piece of metal tore his forehead open, but who returned a few hours later, head taped up, to swing again. Prior’s choice to isolate his subjects in a world of smoke and dust might seem like a sign that he’s interested only in wild action. However, his stark framing grants the scene a mythic, muscular force, illuminating the peculiar and self-sacrificing dedication required to make any tradition last.