Photo essay: drawn to the bright hues painted on basketball, tennis and volleyball courts in low-income neighbourhoods, New York-based photographer Ward Roberts has scoured the globe to capture these pastel-toned pockets of urban space (+ slideshow).
Initially aiming to document Hong Kong's car parks, Roberts found a deeper connection with the city's basketball courts and switched his focus to these colourful spaces instead.
He noticed that many of the most multicoloured courts were located beside low-income apartment buildings, and used these as landmarks to track down the hidden spaces.
After publishing a first set as Courts 01, Roberts continued his search while on travels to Bermuda, Hawaii, New York and Melbourne. In these locations, he also snuck into the sports grounds to photograph the empty spaces and built up a comprehensive series of images ? explained in the essay below. The photos are compiled into a new book called Courts 02, published by Éditions, and three are available as limited-edition prints.

The first court picture was taken in 2007. At the time, I was shooting a series of empty parking lots, trying to recreate a series by the German photographer Carsten Meier, just trying figure out how he did it and if I could do it too. It was a really good experience, learning through imitation.
While doing that, I also photographed an empty basketball court in Hong Kong, and I felt a stronger connection to it than to the parking lots because I played a lot of spo...