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Bamberger's 'Hoops' To Open At National Building Museum
7 February 2019
Opening just in time for March Madness, the National Building Museum in will exhibit Bill Bamberger's Hoops. The series of images of private and public basketball courts share one unique trait. They are devoid of people.
"I never photographed the players, finding that the 'place' spoke loudly about its users," Bamberger said. "I could easily imagine the players and in some cases I met them. But more often in the stillness of the court -- photographed in early morning or late afternoon light -- I came to know a great deal about a community, its character and values."
The exhibit runs from March 3 to Jan. 5, 2020 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
National Building Museum to Open 'Hoops'
New exhibition celebrates the power of basketball to transcend place and build community
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On March 9, the National Building Museum opens Hoops, a new exhibition of photographer Bill Bamberger's work capturing private and community basketball courts around the country and abroad. Hauntingly devoid of people, Bamberger's photographs are nonetheless neighborhood and community portraits, reflecting basketball's universal appeal and ability to dissolve demographic, ethnic and regional barriers. Opening just in time for the NCAA Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments, Hoops is on view through Jan. 5, 2020.
Hoops presents a selection of large-format photographs taken across the United States and in more than a dozen countries, from the deserts of Arizona and Mexico to the hills of Appalachia and from the streets of the Northeast to the playgrounds of South Africa. Also featured are images of local basketball courts, including the home of the Goodman League Courts in Southeast Washington, D.C., as well as courts in Maryland and Virginia. Although the game's standard equipment is simple and well known, Bamberger's color photographs show that the permutations for a basketball court and backboard are nearly endless. The design and construction of these spaces tell us as much about the communities in which they are found as they do about the game itself.
Bamberger began working on the Hoops series in 2004. Early in the project, Bamberger asked his auto mechanic if he played basketball growing up. "He said yes and took me to the court he played on as a young boy," said Bamberger. "It was an abandoned barn with fading red paint and a white wooden backboard. It was hauntingly nostalgic and I thought if I can find such a beautiful court so close to home I can find one almost anywhere." Fifteen years later, he has taken nearly 22,000 photographs for the series.
"I never photographed the players, finding that the 'place' spoke loudly about its users," said Bamberger. "I could easily imagine the players and in some cases I met them. But more often in the stillness of the court -- photographed in early morning or late afternoon light -- I came to know a great deal about a community, its character and values."
Bamberger has been photographing Americans and their daily lives for more than two decades. His work explores major social issues of our time: the demise of the American factory, the dream of home ownership and the challenges facing urban adolescents. For most of his career, Bamberger's photography has been people-focused, narrating complex stories through portraiture.
Bamberger has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Courtside: Photographs by Bill Bamberger presented a selection of the images featured in Hoops), as well as previously at the National Building Museum (Stories of Home: Photographs by Bill Bamberger, December 2003 -- March 2004). He was one of 56 a.m.erican artists to participate in Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium, the National Endowment for the Arts millennium project where he produced part two in an ongoing series about teenage boys coming of age. His photographs have appeared in Aperture, Doubletake, Harper's and the New York Times Magazine and he has been profiled on CBS Sunday Morning, CSPAN2's About Books and NPR's All Things Considered.