I am a Melburnian and a tennis fan. Despite month upon month of a hard lockdown last year to achieve our much-envied covid-free status, despite low-level ire at the preferential treatment sport gets here compared with things like the arts, I wanted the tournament to go ahead. I willed it to go ahead.

Binging on tennis was the way my family rounded out the summer school holidays and escaped unrelenting blistering mid-summer days of above 40C. At 11am curtains were drawn to block out the heat and minimise reflection on the television screen. The squeak of sneakers on the hardcourt and crack of the tennis ball became the ambient soundtrack of the house, accompanied by pedestal fans and air conditioning. Over the course of the tournament, an installation of tennis photography grew across my wardrobe door, each player carefully cut out from the newspaper and attached with lumps of bluetak. Anna Kournikova, Martina Hingis, Steffi Graff, Pat Rafter — tennis was at the heart of my first photography exhibitions.

I wanted the tournament to go ahead to achieve a true feeling of summer normalcy, to believe the year ahead would be different than the one before. I wanted a chance to photograph an event that marked the end of every summer I can remember. While the virus found ways to disrupt and public sentiment towards the event dipped and swayed, somehow the show did indeed go on.

Here are some of the features that ran on The New York Times with my pictures, written by Matthew Futterman:

Big thanks to Fujifilm Australia for loaning me an incredible kit for this assignment. I was able to get my hands on a GFX 100 and two X-T4 camera bodies plus a range of lenses to cover me courtside and beyond.