Summer time in Beijing

A word about the work

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Following the success of Chinese basketball players in the NBA, especially Yao Ming of Houston Rockets, L’Équipe Magazine commissioned Elisa Haberer to produce a feature on basketball in China in 2007. An immersion in stories, both great and small. To produce the work she travelled all over the city, and scoured the countryside for weeks. One day while riding her bike in the city, looking for places where street basketball was played, she came across this lone player, in this unlikely place, a dry canal by the second ringroad.
Elisa Haberer’s account

It was hot, a white sky summer, a Beijing summer. The 2nd ringroad canal, which I would only see full of water a year later thanks to the arrival of the Olympic Games, was desperately empty and monochrome. And then there was this basketball, its weightlessness seeming to ignore everything about that heavy summer.

Jean-Denis’s choice

An image that goes against the idea of the Beijing throngs. Graphic, pure lines adding to great documentary wealth. The setting grabs me, the passion for basketball means something to me, the loneliness of the hero moves me. Understated and superb.