Well the book If by Rudyard Kipling came about — actually this is where I talk about being in the moment and creating it based on things going on in your life. And what happened was there was one day I happened to be taking some pictures outside of a basketball game. And for whatever reason, when I got home that night I decided to go through my bookshelf and just look through some poems and just kind of get the juices flowing.
And I came across the poem “If”. As I was reading each line, the photographs I had taken that day started popping into my head as paring up with the words perfectly to visually illustrate what the words meant. And I said “Oh I should do this as a book, and that I could photograph different sports.” And the moment that I sat and wrote it down. It was in a book so I had to write it down to see it all out.
The brain started clicking things and the motion, gears just started dropping. And before I knew it, I had it figured out how I would actually shoot it. And when I did shoot it, the parameters were since it was written by a man in the voice of a father to his son that I only focused on boys playing these sports showing them at their best, at their most challenging, at their most difficult. You know things.
We actually happened to where I lived at the time, happened to have a, kind of like the Olympic Games, it’s called the Empire State Games. In New York State. And they happened to be where we lived that year so our local high school held many of the events. Then some of the other events were local colleges and things like that. So basically it was like getting to shoot at the Olympics.
It was very serendipitous that I happened to be photographing that project at that time. Because many of the sports that I photographed I would never get to photograph on a regular basis. Like archery, you know, you know that was one in particular that stood out. So I got to get a variety of images just because of that.
