Hello, Old Sport

On a December evening in 2002, while I was driving home from my studio in London, an abandoned football got caught under one of the wheel arches of my car. This chance encounter seemed to kick start a sequence of almost uncannily frequent meetings with old sports balls. I decided to photograph them, framing the project as a response to the way in which many contemporary artists choose to give found objects – unadulterated and resolutely ordinary – the status of an art work. Shot under studio lighting designed to create the stand-alone drama of a classic Hollywood portrait, and reproduced at an unfamiliar scale, the balls take on a very different character, and some powerful, often comic, physiognomies are revealed.

The sports photography from this personal photography project form part of the collection of prints and posters to purchase on Ball to all that Sports Images