Wellington

"If polo is the sport of Kings, then Wellington in Florida is its Winter Palace. In these green pastures incongruously close to the Atlantic beaches, a few modest horse rings have evolved into the world’s largest and longest competitive equestrian festival. Lauded riders convene to compete at many disciplines and a vast temporary community congregates each January to celebrate their love of horses and, to a large extent, each other.

It is a social carnival but it would be wrong to dismiss Wellington as simply being an ancillary part of the Palm Beach society circuit; serious money is involved at every level of this food chain. This is where show jumpers earn their crust and where polo players make their reputations. If Detroit is the home of the American car industry, then Wellington is the home of its horse industry. And it is very much an industry. There is more work going on in Wellington than in Palm Beach, but it is horse work.

In our travels, we have been fortunate to meet both the Hildenbrand family and the Ganzi family who are key cogs within the world of competitive polo. They were both very supportive of my plans to do an equestrian series in Wellington and offered the use of their stunning properties and polo fields.

I saw this as a chance to directly use the community as extras—as I wanted to convey not only a sense of place, but also a sense of that exact community. Polo is not an obscure sport here; it is an integral part of the fabric of the place and attracts decent crowds to the big events.

It is a tribal sport to the extent that there is a way to dress and a way to behave, and my instincts were that I needed to capture a sense of uniformity. Polo crowds are not like golf crowds or football crowds—they very much have their own identity.

I want to thank the Ganzi family and Michelle Marshall for their help that glorious spring evening in Wellington. Without their partnership, my camera would never have captured this moment in time."

- David Yarrow