Although I’ve used toys to represent the human figure in several previous bodies of work over the past five years, the Good Sports series was more directely influenced by the boxes of plastic figures that my mother kept for use in her cake decorating business in the 1950s. Because I was forbidden to play with these objects, the power to create and control miniature worlds was then, and continues to be, seductive. The sports figures are about the only human representations in the cake decorating supply stores, which made me consider our national obsession with sports; a double edged sword, like the toys themselves.

            I use a view camera to obtain a large negative full of detail with a long lens and close focus to limit the depth of field to a very shallow space. The out of focus areas, usually secondary photographs, allow me to maintain an illusion of reality, albeit momentarily. The large format camera also lets me draw a narrow line of focus that is not parallel with the picture plane. Drawing that line diagonally through space allows me to focus the viewers attention on formal relationships within the frame.