Boys and Basketball

Last year I participated in the second part of a great course called CREATING DEEPER DOCUMENTARY IMAGERY for 12 weeks by a brilliant teacher, photographer, and human being named CHUCK ANERINO -where one of the things that we were tasked with was to work on a short photo project.

Being sort of new to my neighborhood and primarily used to working from home, I realized that socializing with strangers and being outside was painfully uncomfortable - so I struggled a little bit but eventually settled on visiting these group of kids that played basketball almost every day after school.

They were your typical 13-16 year olds who were classmates, friends, competitors, and brothers. And I am convinced that they had a competition of who could trash talk the other better.

Over a span of 6-8 weeks, I visited the 7th Avenue Park basketball court, their school gym, and another court they practiced at and eventually found out that some of them were even prepping to participate in a summer basketball league. After eventually getting to know them a bit more, I found out that three of them have hopes of taking basketball seriously and that they all have known one another from elementary school.

Overall my aim of the project was to capture and show their love of basketball, friendship, and brotherhood and also try to capture that basketball boy joy with a mixture of documentary style images and posed portraits.

Enjoy!

Calieq

Saquan

Zyion

Zaire

Jeremiah

Jacob

Manny

Jeremy