COLOGNE.- For over twenty years, American photographer Sean Hemmerle (born 1966) has been exploring the theme of basketball as an international cultural phenomenon that transcends borders, languages, and religions in his series Hoops. The first image in the series was taken in 2003. At the time, Hemmerle was documenting crisis areas and had therefore traveled to Iraq. When he saw a basketball court in Baghdad, it occurred to him that, against the backdrop of the controversial actions of the Bush administration, this sport might be the most significant cultural export of the United States. Since then, Hemmerle has documented basketball courts across the North American continent, from Arizona to New Hampshire, from Texas to Canada, as well as fourteen other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa to capture what he sees as a symbol of “a better form of American diplomacy” with the hoops, as they are able to represent the true diversity and spirit of his homeland much more appropriately in the world than any other export goods. It is not the law of the strongest, but a high degree of team spirit and the integration of each individual player into the team that characterizes this sport, which was invented in 1891 by a Canadian in Springfield, Massachusetts, and became one of the most widespread team sports worldwide during the 20th century.

The eponymous protagonist of the series—the simple yet iconic construction consisting of a stand, backboard, and basket—is photographed in frontal view by Hemmerle and placed in the center of the image. However, it is the surrounding space that takes on equal significance in his images, i.e., the landscape or urban structure in which the hoop is located. The viewer instinctively begins to search the surrounding area—Hemmerle photographs exclusively publicly accessible open spaces—for clues that allow local identification. Characters as well as the country’s typical architecture, landscape, and vegetation serve as clues here. The consistently identical, universal construction principle of the hoop, whether photographed in Hebron or Reykjavik, Cologne or the Bronx, as well as Hemmerle’s uniform, strictly objective mode of photography, invite comparative viewing. This is further enhanced by the hanging of the pictures in the form of a tableau. The tradition in which Hemmerle’s work stands is unmistakably visible here. The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, in which the industrial architecture captured becomes an “anonymous sculpture,” are just as relevant here as the New Topographics, which traced the interventions in the landscape altered by humans in their images.

In 2025, Sean Hemmerle began expanding the series with aerial photographs of basketball courts, which he takes using a drone. From above, he transforms the courts, with their numerous playing field lines contrasting brightly against different colored backgrounds, into aesthetically appealing, graphically abstract structures that—due to weathering or cleaning marks, for example—sometimes have a painterly effect. Like the Hoops photographed from the front, most of the Courts are deserted, with a few exceptions, yet artifacts in the images of both series of works bear witness to those who use the courts: trash left at the edge of the playing field, discarded clothing, tags and graffiti, or tire marks from motorcycles, which contrast with the bright markings on the playing field in the form of circular, dark structures. These narrative elements and visual references to a “before” give the images a temporal dimension, making them building blocks of narrative that, upon closer inspection, is expanded by further details such as chipped paint, crumbling asphalt, cracks, leaves, and puddles.

In the Courts series, which have so far been photographed exclusively in the USA, the motif and the material used by Sean Hemmerle—for several years now, he has preferred to print his digitally photographed images on high-quality Hahnemühle paper—form a successful combination: the slightly textured, velvety surface of the paper provides a haptic counterpart to the court surfaces.

Hemmerle’s images celebrate the hoop as a universal icon, a symbol that stands for solidarity, togetherness, and fair play, and which asserts itself worldwide, regardless of geopolitical upheavals, resistances, and crises. In today’s times of ongoing unrest and conflict, and against the backdrop of recent events in the USA, the relevance of his artistic approach is evident.

Sean Hemmerle’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, his works are included in private collections (Elton John, Martin Margulies) and and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the International Center of Photography, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His photographs have been published in major publications, including Time and The New York Times Magazine.