I don’t know why I liked this photo so much when I made it. Maybe because it was a spontaneous idea—I’d piled up some stuff from the house and I was practicing lighting in our basement (off-camera flash plus a little backfill light). I’d already learned many times that round objects or objects with curves, especially if they have reflective surfaces, often photograph poorly. There’s something uncanny about roundness in representational terms. Plus an old abandoned basketball that had just been sitting outside in the backyard seemed kind of unadorned by itself, it didn’t even have an obvious velveteen-rabbity sort of pathos.
So I grabbed the mask and voila! A character was born! Which is the problem with the photo: everyone who has seen it thinks I’m referencing something specific in popular culture. Mostly this was just a learning experience with lighting, that’s all. But maybe an experiment in creativity too: not having an idea is sometimes best.
Even though it's just a ball and mask it has a lot of personality!
A masked ball? Seems kind of a high-culture reference to me.