Jake Verzosa Has Shot Over 500 Basketball Courts in the PH—And He's Still Shooting

(SPOT.ph) Filipinos will insist they can be great at basketball no matter their height. And they will insist on playing basketball come hell or high water—even if there’s only the slightest semblance of a basketball court around.

That’s the message one gets looking at the 100 photographs of basketball courts currently on show at Silverlens Gallery in Chino Roces Extension. Seeing them individually on photographer Jake Verzosa’s Instagram in the past, they looked like singular monuments to a country’s obsession with a sport not even its own. But seeing the pictures all together tells a different story.

Versoza, known for his portraits of young Filipino punks and the tattooed women of Kalinga, traces his first ever photograph for what would become this series to a picture he took in 2012, while working on his book on the aforementioned tattooed women. It’s a picture of a roofless court in Tabuk, Kalinga, its floor just hard-packed soil. Between the court and the mountain behind it is a chicken wire fence that suggests a restricted area; the clothes hanging on the background likely the clothes of workers whose diversion from the day’s toil is a basketball game.

That maiden photo was taken with an iPhone 6, just like the early pictures from the series. Instagram was just on the rise then and proved the perfect platform for the images because of its geotagging feature. Jake would use more advanced iPhones over time, but the composition of the pictures remained: simple, straightforward. He hasn't stopped shooting, having shifted his view of this project now as an archive of sorts. He never sought them out, these spaces of play, but he was always ready to snap a basketball court that caught his fancy—“Naging habit na,” he says—whether it’s during his bike rides or while on a story assignment.

Eventually patterns emerged: the court’s infrastructure, the improvised backboards, and so on. Eventually he wasn’t just shooting a court but shooting environment—the life that made the place, the community that gathers there, the culture of an area. Consider the sacks of rice stacked behind a ring in Cagayan, and the palay laid out on a banig on the other side getting some sun. It gives the term “multi-purpose hall”—which basketball courts are in the Philippines —another dimension. Consider too the bare bones ring of a court in Tacloban immediately after Haiyan, it's basket the colors of the Philippine flag, behind it a group of faded palaces in an abandoned theme park. It’s a picture of both hope and devastation, and a reminder of one of the worst times in recent history.

“Pag tiningnan mo sila, kuwento na rin siya ng Pilipinas eh,” says Jake as he walks me thru the pictures at Silverlens. We couldn’t help but agree. These pictures say a lot about us as a country and as Filipinos. We’re creative. We’re madiskarte. We’re—and we're aware it's become a dirty word— resilient. We refuse to be defined by limitations and the cards we’re dealt. And we will always play ball with life no matter our height, and no matter the odds.

Basketball Landscapes is part of an ongoing show called Play at Silverlens Gallery in Chino Roces Avenue Extension. The show also features works by Aze Ong and Jennifer K. Wofford. Catch the exhibit until May 16, 2026.