Through the Goalpost brings together football pitches photographed across cities and territories around the world. Rather than documenting the game itself, the series uses the goal as a simple viewing device: a frame through which the surrounding city can be observed.
From Casablanca, Phnom Penh and Seoul to London, Copenhagen and Oman, the same elementary structure appears against radically different forms of urbanisation. Housing blocks, new developments, infrastructure, water, mountains and vacant land are temporarily contained within its rectangular outline.
The goal becomes a recurring architectural gesture, two vertical lines and a horizontal one capable of establishing scale and order almost anywhere. Sometimes carefully built, sometimes improvised or deteriorating, it marks a space for play while simultaneously revealing the territory beyond it.
Photographed during long walks through peripheral and transitional areas, these structures become less the subject of the images than a way of looking. Across very different geographies, the series proposes the football goal as an unexpectedly universal frame through which to read the contemporary city.
© Manuel Álvarez Diestro (MAD)
