Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the British photographer, model, and writer Laura Bailey loved sports—she ran track and cross-country, tackled mountain-climbing, and watched Wimbledon religiously, a rite of English summers. While Bailey immersed herself in the world of athletics, the Maltese-British photographer Mark Arrigo obsessed over landscapes. Lulling hills and dramatic seascapes were, for him, a form of meditation.
A project on tennis courts seemed a natural place for the two photographers and longtime collaborators to intersect. Bailey approached Arrigo with an idea: What if they worked on a book about tennis courts together—not just show courts but dilapidated community ones as well?
“My aim was to transcend mere depictions of tennis courts,” Arrigo writes in his essay in Courtship: For the Love of Tennis, “capturing instead the sense of discovery and wonder that a player experiences upon finding that new and special court.”
Bailey and Arrigo set about photographing dozens of them—from Lisbon’s run-down Clube de Ténis do Jamor, flanked by majestic pine trees, to a lonely red-clay court in northern Scotland, marooned in a landscape of verdant hills. Arrigo used the same camera and lens throughout to give his images visual consistency.
“We climbed trees and scrambled across rooftops and clifftops and waded into the sea,” writes Bailey.
Moving from Rome to Warsaw to Prague to Mount Vesuvius, Courtship contains more than 200 photographs. The courts become an ode to the game itself, which is as irresistible to pros on grass as to kids on cracked parking lots. Angles, vectors, ritual, calibration—whether concrete, asphalt, or clay, that one large rectangle divided into six smaller ones holds tournaments of Euclidean grandeur. The book, co-produced by Michael Lynton, the chairman of Snap Inc., will direct a portion of its proceeds to the LTA Foundation’s grassroots tennis programs.
Quotes from figures such as Minnie Driver and David Beckham round out the final pages. “Who knew that a two-piece rubber shell filled with pressurized gas and clad in fuzzy yellow stuff could promise so much?” writes Eddie Redmayne. “Dear Tennis,” adds Naomi Osaka, “I love you, I love you not, I love you.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail
