Jessica Hilltout Documents African Grassroots Soccer in Amen
The images in Jessica Hilltout‘s Amen tell a gripping story of the joy soccer provides for Africa’s less fortunate. Inspired by her father, Hilltout set off to photograph soccer in Africa in all its shapes and sizes, coming to the conclusion that “the beautiful game exists in its purest form in what I saw — people playing for the joy of playing.”
Hilltout’s photographs, collected in the self-published book, are also currently on display in galleries in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Brussels:
Jessica Hilltout, a nomadic, Belgian-born photographer, loaded sacks of deflated soccer balls onto the roof of a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle last year and began a seven-month road trip across Africa to document the continent’s love of the game. She found it in villages where children played with joyous abandon on dusty patches of ground, sandy beaches and lush fields, far from the stadiums where Africa’s first World Cup would be held.
She captured their sense of play in lyrical images hanging now in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Brussels galleries. Gleeful little boys in Burkina Faso leap in exultation as their team scores. A young fisherman goes airborne as he hits a header on a beach in Togo. Barefoot boys in Ghana lope gracefully across a field as their slender, elongated shadows chase them.
Book details
- Amen: Grassroots Football by Jessica Hilltout
EAN: 9780620466677
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Image courtesy Jessica Hilltout
Apr
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