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.”