shaun fenn: on the pond
While many of us spend the winter months bemoaning the cold weather and counting down the days until spring, Minnesotans are playing pond hockey.
Huddling up on small, neighborhood ponds where the ice is continually undulating under foot to play hockey, northern communities know how to keep the winter doldrums at bay. And capturing the sport, a derivative of traditional hockey played at a smaller scale, had been on photographer Shaun Fenn’s project wish list for some time. “An opportunity presented itself to go up north and do this shoot, so I jumped on a plane and went for it,” he says.
“Anything that’s active and that’s outdoors, I love,” Fenn explains. He spent five days documenting the action at the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships. “It was fascinating to watch this pond hockey subculture and to draw similarities between what we do to have fun over on the West Coast. This is these people’s passion: they do it at odd times of day or night, when it’s 15 below out, drinking their Hamm’s or Busch beers with their babies bundled up, rolling around on the ice, having a ball.”
As Fenn explains it, pond hockey is played with far fewer people on the ice at a time, no goalie, and wooden two-by-fours at each end of the rink to serve as the goal. “The pond is frozen with a foot and a half of ice, which, by the way, is expanding and contracting and cracking the whole time,” he says.
Fenn’s series includes portraits of individual athletes as well as plenty of on-ice action shots—sticks and skates caught in motion, cloud-like breaths rising up from the movement. Rather than have the perspective feel like that of a spectator, he wanted the lens to focus in close, to allow the viewer to feel like they were right there, part of the game.
“I like my imagery to feel tactile, emotional, inclusive. Even if you haven’t ever played pond hockey and never will, I hope you can look at those and get the feel for the sport and can put yourself into the action,” he says. “These people just had such a wonderful attitude, doing what they love in the frigid, frigid cold.”
To see more from the series, link here.