HOOP
By Bill Bamberger
Essay by Richard B. Woodward
Forthcoming from George F. Thompson Publishing
Basketball is the only major league and Olympic ballgame that was invented by North Americans. Its popularity in the U. S. is near mythic, matched only by baseball and football, and its players are icons and role models for American youth. Its appeal is universal, dissolving ethnic, demographic and regional barriers.
Bill Bamberger has traveled all across America taking pictures of hoops, from the deserts of Arizona to the inner city of New York. There are lonely hoops out on the prairie, hoops tacked to urban steel walls, hoops sandwiched in between the garage and the back yard. These stunning color photographs of hoops and courts all across America will appeal to anyone who loves basketball––and even those who don’t––but who is fascinated by American culture and our ongoing love affair with the sport. These images of hoops connect us to the place of basketball in our lives––where we play it, how we feel about it, and what it means to us culturally.
Bill Bamberger is a photographer based in North Carolina whose work explores large social issues of our time. His Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory was published to wide acclaim by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University with W. W. Norton. Richard B. Woodward is a critic and journalist based in New York who has written extensively about art and photography.
