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Words by Howard Byrom
From a lone rusty backboard backboard high above the wind-swept plains of Wyoming, to a plastic rim fixed to a telegraph pole in South Central Los Angeles, basketball hoops are a universal symbol of modern America.
Whether nailed hopefully above a pavement by a concerned father as his child's ticket out of the ghetto, or attatched to a garage in a leafy New Jersey suburb, "the evidence is absolutely everywhere," says Sonja Campbell, a 28-year-old photographer from Brixton in London. Campbell recently devoted the best part of a fortnight to frenetically traversing the land of the brave, snapping basketball hoops in domestic locations left, right and centre. The results form a singularly anthropological photography exhibition, which is showing in London this weekend.
Although Campbell admits that her natural nosiness played a large part in her interest, the objective, she says, "was to acknowledge an icon which essentially unites the un-United States". Her pictures certainly create a sense of this huge, multifarious and economically disparate nation. "From the hard-bitten sidewalks of Harlem, to the hermetically sealed enclaves of Beverly Hills, whether it's a street-smart kid or a movie producer, nobody is too poor or too snobby to play," says Campbell.
With more than 48 million basketball players across the States, there is a level of fanaticism about the sport there that is hard for the British to comprehend. Indeed, the smorgasboard of amateurism and enthusiastic improvisation that Campbell encountered in her 12-day marathon was, she says, often overwhelming.
Yet the hoops shown in Campbell's photographs have an improbably lyrical resonance. There's the poetic isolation of a rim lost in an empty field miles from the nearest town; the ironic sight of a "Lifetime" brand backboard surrounded by gravestones in a Bible Belt cemetery. There is the hoop jarringly juxtaposed with an unfenced railroad in Georgia, and the unholy communion of a hoop next to the Virgin Mary in a Italian neighbourhood in Brooklyn. And, hoops in a parking space for the disabled in the San Fernando Valley.
Such a trip was unlikely to pass without trouble, and it didn't. In the Deep South an elderly woman tending her pumpkin patch took exception to Campbell's interest in a neighbour's hoop and fired a warning shot. "It sounded like it was just a flare or something" Campbell laughs, "but it was against my better judgement to hang around and find out."
None the less, she got the picture.
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