Playing with visual contrasts, ‘Basketball Reawakening’ depicts the solitude that exists in our hyper-connected world today. I want to show how people are influenced by this new technological age. Many people feel isolated and depressed. In my work, I depict these contradictions by using faded colors to represent this sad reality. Though uncomfortable in their loneliness, I create images that are pleasant to look at, and which awaken a sense of optimism. Maybe the future isn’t so bleak after all.

This book is an intimate and evocative account of the ebbs and flows of life on a basketball court. The photographs portray the genuine personalities of the players who ‘live’ on that basketball court, and it doesn’t matter that the  participants are usually ununiformed or even playing ‘shirts versus skins’. The images tell stories of anger, hopes, arrivals, and departures, providing an extraordinarily original vision rarely proposed by everyday life.

I focused on the most significant moments, those that change one’s life forever. The book questions reality too, leaving the reader wondering what is fact and what is fiction. I am concerned with a more subtle but obvious question that affects basketball and life, based on the experience one can gain from it, both as a player and as a spectator: its manifestation and action as a vital phenomenon. Dreams are very personal, but they are also universal, because it’s a process that happens to all of us. The way people describe them represents the most brilliant storytelling. They set up the time, the space, the mood. You become immersed in their world through your imagination.

At the beginning I spent time ‘photographing the arena’, where the athletes fight, but as time went on I began to capture the ‘transition and preparation’ spaces and portraits of the audience too. I decided the images should be black and white to capture the impact I felt that existed between the ‘light and shadow’, in some cases taking them more towards the shadows to increase the explosion of the light I felt they held. There’s an ambiguity to each shot, each word, the fictionalized and the real coming together to paint a picture of ‘moments’, of freedom, tear. Every basketball court in the world is the same, and every basketball court is uniquely, and since we are here ... the court reflects this place.

My connection with basketball courts is emotional. For me basketball courts show the human search for answers, dissolving borders between reality and fiction, they take us to a transcendental terrain and open up diverse interpretations. This is exactly what these images do, in their very creation they join the vestiges and fragments that help ‘form and construct’ basketball courts … the basketball court. I am motivated by a desire to show ‘people on one side of the world’ what’s happening to ‘people on the other side of the world’. I’m really interested in what this book can tell you, and it can tell you a lot if you let it.

I don’t want to simply retell the story of basketball courts in this book, but to synthesize the impression I got from it. The world that I build for the story to live in is really just another way to look at that story. It’s my way of telling my own story inside somebody else’s.

The street basket is a really beautiful tool for storytelling, because words can only get you so far. Words hit the head, but the street basket always hits the heart, leaving an impression that lingers. People really connect to stories told through the street basket, which has led to its growing popularity. It’s of the body language, after all our most basic human instinct is to move. It doesn’t matter your culture, language, educational background, or if you can read or write, the street basket is universal. A language of its own that always reaches you.

I spend time magnifying those quiet, private moments of intimacy, or lack of. I like to take those small, seemingly subtle, unimportant moments and make them feel very grand and important, as they truly are. I intend to show the magic and the beautiful things happening there. Most stories that I take on, or long-term personal projects, somehow feed a curiosity about things that keep me up at night. I use the basketball court as a tool and as an excuse to find answers to those questions. Body language and knowing eyes, always seemingly looking at something beyond the frame, suggest interiority, complexity and a life that continues once the viewer has moved on.

Young people are seeking their own self-esteem and self-confidence. Those who observe street basket passingly and critique its ‘simplicity’, sometimes perceived as ‘vulgarity’, find it a strange subject. I not only ‘see’ it, I sense the necessity for it. I come across ‘Masters’ of life who tell me about deep philosophies, about souls, about sensations, about approach to life marked by meditation, a positive mindset, deep humility, and a commitment to continuous growth.

‘Self-worth is our sense of value as a human being. It describes the core beliefs we have about our worth and value. Our self-worth is an internal measurement. It’s how we see ourselves and who we perceive ourselves to be. Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It’s determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation.’

It’s strange to observe great minds as engineers, medical people, scientific people, great ‘life characters’ who have an obsession with solving problems of reality, when most problems are actually  problems of perception. For example, advertising adds value by changing the perception, not the product, and that perceived value can be just as rewarding as real value. In essence, we can change behaviour by telling people a story that makes them perceiving something differently.

The basketball court ‘must be’ perceived, understood, ‘listen to’. We give it meaning when we look at it and try to understand it. For me, the photos of this book are a representation of the physical world, but of an emotional realm as well. The 'basketball court' can change the way we perceive the world, and the way we understand ourselves.