Austin Bell takes pictures of basketball courts from above, one by one, as if he was doing a census of the city. Since 2021 he has been documenting the New York Regulatory Outdoor Fields, those large enough to host a whole game. So far he photographed 1.441, distributed in the five boroughs, and estimated that he had arrived at about 95 percent of the work.
The result is not only a collection of sports images. Viewed from above, playgrounds become a sort of parallel map of New York: colorful rectangles between palaces, schools, parks, public courtyards, popular houses and neighborhood pieces. Some fields are very recognizable, others seem almost hidden. There are recently remade surfaces, discolored lines, repairs, park department logos, murals, fences, billboards consumed. Each field says something about how that space was used, maintained, modified, and the neighborhood where it is, about the people who attend it and also how these places become vehicles of culture and sociality.
The New York project arrives after a similar work that Bell had done in Hong Kong, where he had photographed all 2.549 outdoor basketball courts in the city. For that project he used Google Maps and a drone, working for 140 days and producing more than 40,000 photographs. In Hong Kong the starting point had been mainly the colors: many fields are painted with very bright colors and are located in the middle of dense neighborhoods, often narrow between high buildings and infrastructure. New York is different: it has less uniform, more dirty fields, more marked by everyday use. For this reason, in the photos of Bell the city appears less like a postcard and more like an inventory of living places.
In New York outdoor basketball has a special weight because it is not only a sports practice. Some fields have become symbolic places, even outside the neighborhood, like Rucker Park in Harlem, linked to tournaments founded by Holcombe Rucker and the history of streetball. But Bell’s work seems interesting especially when he moves away from famous fields. Putting well-known playgrounds and fields without name, the project lowers the hierarchy between “mitic” places and ordinary places. It shows that the culture of New York basketball is not only in the places told a thousand times, but also in a huge amount of anonymous surfaces where people play, wait for turn, look, spend time.
When it is finished, the archive can be read in many ways: as a photographic project, as an urban document, as an involuntary catalog of the conditions of public spaces. It is also a quite effective way to remember how much a city can be told starting from minimal elements. A basketball court is a simple thing: two baskets, a rectangle, some lines. Repeated over a thousand times, it becomes a way to see New York without leaving its monuments, but from the places where the city is used every day.
L’articolo A photographer has collected almost all New York basketball courts proviene da IlNewyorkese.
