“I used to go to the U.S. Open on my birthdays and sit in the nosebleeds….” Andy Roddick’s testimony is more than just a vintage teenage photograph. The former world No. 1’s memory describes a Slam that still manages to raise the glamour and significance of his homeland, New York City, the ‘Center of the Universe.’ The US Open is an American folk festival, an atypical Thanksgiving painted with volleys and aces. It is the architecture of Manhattan, the rhythms of Wall Street and the traffic of Broadway, a bright SoHo party that attracts eyes from around the world. If, as Yannick Noah once said, on the streets of the Big Apple every foreigner feels foreign to the core, it is also true that, in the stands of Flashing Meadows, the New Yorker feels New Yorker to the core, and that any tennis fan breathes the essence of a unique metropolis. Even from the nosebleeds.

Chris Caporaso’s lens takes us into this tennis world, portraying its scenery and morphology. The gallery and words of the Australian photographer confirm the unique appeal of this event, as well as the universal fascination with New York’s tennis paradise. 

“The US open experience is hard to explain in a few words. The nostalgia of the event for me spending a lifetime watching these green and blue courts from 17,000km away to being here at Flushing Meadows. Everything hits different, the crowd is different, gives energy on another level here. Not captured in this set is how much tennis takes over the best city on earth. Hard to walk these streets and not see something tennis related from kids with racquets in their backpacks to murals of players and other brand related content.”

We talked with Chris in our special Behind the Lights column. You can read that article here. And we also watched his Australian Open’s perspectives, check them out here.