3 February 2015
The West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, hosted the US Open for almost sixty years, until 1978, when it was transferred to Flushing Meadows, also in the borough of Queens. The decades in which the tournament was held at Forest Hills saw the consecration of many champions who went on to become legends in the world of tennis and witnessed crucial transformations in the sport in general: new playing surfaces, regulations and scoring systems, as well as changes in society and custom. Bill Sullivan has tapped into this stream of impressions and visions to create Forest Hills, a book that pays homage to the location and at the same time reinvents its history. Sullivan uses photography as a repository of visual records, digitally stitching together images of different origin and exploring the metamorphosis of the site over the years. A tribute to the aesthetics of the venue and its codes of communication, to the influence that tennis has had on fashion, design and art. Scoreboards, clothing, interior decorations and racket covers become signs that go beyond the sporting event, revealing themselves as authentic fragments of the collective imagination. Published by SUN.