Behind the Photo: A Basketball and a Tall Fence
A silent image formed by lost American Dreams
Faceless and nameless, a group of teenage boys scattered around a basketball court. The rubber soles of their tennis shoes screeched as they scraped the concrete. The boys taunted each other, challenging their defender to stop their advancement to the basket. If someone heard their voices from outside, the sounds might remind them of all the hope that youth offered. As I watched the drama unfold in front of me, I knew the scene was repeating in neighborhoods across America. Except on this court, unscalable sheet-metal walls surround the play area and stretch 20 feet into the sky, topped by another chain-link fence angled at 45 degrees towards the court. These boys could not leave this place. They are prisoners.
I had traveled to New Orleans to attend a non-profit photography workshop. While doing research on the area, I found Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), a non-profit that provides support to families of incarcerated children. They agreed to let me make pictures of their organization’s efforts to help families and children caught in the system.
The strangely named Youth Study Center (YSC) is the juvenile detention Center for Orleans parish. The YSC is a short-term facility meant for short stays. The youths that are held there are often awaiting court dates before being transferred to other facilities. The detention center flooded during hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2013, at the time I made this picture, the area surrounding the facility looked like a war zone. The roads were filled with potholes that could fit full-sized grocery carts. A mix of badly damaged structures and homes that were slowly being rebuilt stood in the nearby residential neighborhood that paralleled the YSC.
Access to these closed places is often difficult. Especially when they involved underage children in the legal system. I was allowed to photograph only if I asked permission of each child first. I could not show their faces. The outdoor space where the basketball court was located was important to FFLIC because they had assisted in a lawsuit that forced YSC to build the space for the children to play.
“At the time I made this picture, the area surrounding the facility looked like a war zone.”
I wrapped around the court photographing the boys, trying to find angles that did not show their faces. The challenge I faced was showing that this was not a normal basketball court. I needed to elevate this simple activity to express meaning that would touch the soul of anyone that viewed the image. The sky that day was deep blue and the individual clouds floated heavily overhead. I stood at the far end of the basketball court against the direction the boys would be facing the majority of the time. I raised the angle of lens high so I could capture the scene and waited for the a moment to happen with boys at the bottom of the picture. For a fraction of a second, the boys aligned into a triangle pattern on a half court basketball hoop overhead. The picture stood out to me because of its simplicity. The boys positioned at the bottom of the frame reminded me of pawns on a chessboard.
Regardless of the offense, these children have been caught in a set of complex systems much larger than themselves. It becomes easier for us as a society to dismiss children, once we consider the individual actions that lead to their incarceration. But to only consider the low-hanging fruit of individual responsibility will deny any accurate assessment.
In this image, I see the slow suffocation of youth. Their sadness that, like a slow dripping faucet, leaks back into the lives of the juvenile’s families and their communities: a collective pool formed by their lost American Dreams gathered in silence.
