the handball courts, lower east side.

Looking over my last couple of posts, it occurred to me that I sound like I have no idea what I’m doing, photographically-speaking*.  That everything is just some sort of strange happenstance and/or serendipity.  To some extent, that’s what photography is, I suppose: you open a shutter, light floods in, and abracadabra, you’ve captured a moment.  But I have some idea of what goes on, and how I fit into the process.   How 400 speed film on an overcast day will at once make the greys more … grey, and in doing so, make the other colors pop just a bit more.   How if you’re patient enough with your subject matter, even if it’s a harried, fast-moving game like handball, you’ll know when to click the shutter.   How sometimes watching other people watch the game is just as interesting, and just as telling about the game, as the game itself.

There’s such a great hodgepodge of folks that converge upon Sara Roosevelt Park on the weekends to play (and watch) handball, a much more mixed crowd than the soccer or basketball games that take place just south of the handball courts.  It’s not as sexy as the soccer guys, or as sweaty and physical as the basketball dudes.  But there’s something there that makes those handball courts so intriguing — an impromptu, not-exactly-nerdy-but-certainly-not-your-high-school-jocks community of sorts, jostling on the courts or watching intently on the sidelines, all eyes on a tiny bouncing blue ball.   It’s a New York City that I ought to photograph and document much more regularly, methinks.

*I have no idea what I’m doing in a larger, more metaphysical sense, but that’s for another blog entirely.  (Or for my very patient therapist to sort out. )