Image: Boys Playing Stickball, Havana, Cuba, 1999

Description: Boys Playing Stickball, Havana, Cuba, 1999

There's a famous picture taken in the '50s of Willie Mays playing stick ball in Harlem. I played a lot of stick ball growing up and always loved it. I wanted to replicate the Mays photo in Cuba because baseball is the national sport there. It's everywhere. Cuban children play ball in the streets like kids in U.S. cities used to do. It was my last Saturday on this trip and I was slowly weaving through the streets of old Havana, looking for kids playing ball, when I came upon this corner, La Esquina. If you study the picture, you see that every eye, not just the kids' but even the dog's, is on that taped ball. It's the decisive moment, and there's no way to anticipate when you're going to get it. I had a vision of a picture that I'd tried and tried and tried to find but hadn't yet, and I came within a day of not finding it. To me it was all about getting the photograph I'd been searching for and I did it in 20 frames.
Author: Cliff
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
License Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Attribution Required?: Yes