Estevan Oriol: Ballin’
By Zio
Earlier this month, adidas and Undefeated released a limited-edition Top Ten sneaker box set, which comes packaged with coffee table book “1979″ by iconic photographer Estevan Oriol.
We took a trip down to SA Studios in downtown L.A. to talk with Estevan about the project. Here’s the exclusive story behind the images:
“The cool thing about the project was that Undefeated or adidas didn’t tell me what they wanted to do. They just said they wanted to do a coffee table book about streetball. I had to start from scratch.
“I went to New Orleans to shoot C-Murder’s video and while I was driving around there, I noticed that these houses had fallen from Hurricane Katrina, but the basketball hoops hadn’t. And there was a basketball at almost every house that was fucked up. You’d go to a house that had been leveled, flat on the ground, nothing there, and the basketball hoop would be standing up. Or you’d look into somebody’s room that got messed up and there’d be a basketball right there. It was a trip. So I started taking pictures of the basketballs and the hoops.
“Then I went to a job in New York with Cadillac. Once again, I went to go shoot basketball courts. I figured it’s gonna be off the hook, ‘cause this is the home of street ball, and there wasn’t one person on the courts. Nobody. It was kind of cool because it reminded me of that movie I Am Legend and there’s nobody in New York.
“Then I came back to L.A. and went down and shot at Venice Beach, skid row and Pasadena. I wanted to find something that would stand out. So I found these little people called the L.A. Breakers. They’re a little team and they play against regular-sized people. Then I went on to shoot a team of kids that were mentally challenged.
“The last shot in the book is in Cuba. I went there to do a book on hip-hop in Havana. I think the project came out perfectly.”
More photos after the jump.
