Annette Grant has been a fixture in Boston’s photography scene for close to a decade.
Grant, 50, attended the New England School of Photography in the early 2010s and began seriously diving into basketball in 2017. She’s now one of the most recognizable local photographers at games, shooting everything from high school state championships to the Celtics and everything in between.
But in recent years, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Grant is noticing more young faces around her on the sidelines.
“Everywhere I went, no matter what event it was, there were five, six kids with cameras on the baseline, just trying to do what we were doing,” she said.
For decades now, basketball has been intertwined with the rise of highlight culture and social media. The high school mixtape — highlight reels cut up to match the beats of hip-hop and other music — gained steam on YouTube in the late 2000s with young stars like John Wall, and continued into the 2010s with Andrew Wiggins, Dennis Smith Jr., Zion Williamson and many others.
Today, with social media’s obvious platform and quality cameras being (somewhat) more accessible, it’s easier than ever for anyone to try their hand at photography and videography. It’s a passion, not a lucrative business, but teenagers see a chance to get close to the future stars of the region.
Anoke Deitg-Blanchard is one of those teen photographers. The 16-year-old from Cambridge saw a flyer for a teen photography workshop run by Mark Ostow in middle school that caught his eye. Now he’s among the best in the game locally. Deitg-Blanchard has won gold medals in 2023 and 2024 National Art and Writing Scholastic competitions, and his photos have been used by SLAM, Overtime and SportsCenter.
In the summer, Deitg-Blanchard works at the Amigos Summer Camp, which helps him save up money for new equipment. His current setup includes two Sony cameras and two lenses that altogether cost about $8,000. His mom, Jasanne, helps him get around to local events. Deitg-Blanchard has traveled out to New York City’s famed Rucker Park for SLAM showcases, and he’s also photographed the Hoophall Classic in Springfield, Mass.
“I love shooting these top players. It’s so cool to see them too because they're gonna be in the NBA in a year or two,” Deitg-Blanchard said. “A lot of kids that are my age just like capturing the moments and making crazy cool mixtapes for all these players.”
Grant and Deitg-Blanchard first connected when they were photographing AJ Dybantsa at BC High. The top-ranked prospect from Brockton played a unique homecoming game last January, and dozens of photographers scattered around the court to film him.
“[Deitg-Blanchard] asked me for little tidbits (and) tips,” Grant said. “I gave him some information, and that for me was great because I see somebody who really is taking initiative to be better.”
Jason Ong, now a junior at UMass Lowell, played volleyball and basketball at Malden High. He found photography through his school’s yearbook club and saw it as a way to stay close to basketball once he stopped playing. He spent the summer working at a physical therapy clinic, but on the side, he would catch many of the top local prospects at local tournaments like the Let it Fly Classic in Chelsea, Mass.
“It's cool seeing how — I feel old saying this, but I know obviously I'm not that old — but it's cool seeing how their journeys are going,” Ong said.
The player-photographer relationship is key. Ong and Deitg-Blanchard will have players occasionally reach out to them to ask for pictures, or when they tag them in their own posted photos, players will share them to their pages. It’s mutually beneficial; players get high-quality media of themselves, and photographers form a connection with the stars they came to see.
Deitg-Blanchard has built familiarity with Dybantsa, Andre Mills (now at Texas A&M), Bryce Dortch (at Rutgers) and Jaylen Harrell (a Providence commit and senior at CATS). Ong is well-connected with fast-rising Brooks senior Alex Wilkins and many top players who went to Burke, like Jaeden Roberts (now at Putnam Science).
“With AJ, for example, because he went to St. Sebastian’s, I went to a bunch of his games, and he didn't know me at the beginning, right?” Deitg-Blanchard said. “I would just send him all my photos every single time I shot him — I probably shot, like, a dozen St. Seb’s games that he played in, and so as I kept on shooting, he would keep on seeing my work, and then he would ask for the photos. He texted for them, and we just built the relationship as I kept shooting him until he knew my name.”
High-quality photo and video isn’t just a tool to satisfy vanity. It can also be the tiny separator for an athlete to be seen by a potential college scout.
“It's such a popular thing because people are just loving themselves right now and loving to see themselves, but the reality is that at least for basketball, a lot of the first looks that coaches, scouts, those kinds of people, at whatever level it is see is through these mixtapes, and even more so for those who aren't necessarily high-level players,” Grant said.
Most agree that though photographers are competing for shine, everyone is generally supportive of each other. Grant has developed meaningful friendships with some of her peers. She's close with Grayland Seales, founder of well-known local outlet The Connect Media, as well as sports and concert photographer Joe Allen and Cassidy Nguyen, a recent Boston Latin Academy graduate who has crafted documentary-style films for the Nobles girls basketball team. Aaron Cooley, a senior basketball player at Brown who’s from Roxbury, Mass., is also among the inner circle of established media.
Those five know each other well because they frequented inner-city basketball tournaments before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they didn’t always have time to get to every event. Now Grant notices that community basketball is being covered consistently, even if she can’t make it.
“It's great because I don't feel such pressure now to cover the community because I know somebody is going to cover it,” she said. “And that's really important to me, that those kids and those different organizations that are nonprofits are still able to get good, quality media coverage without necessarily having to worry about a bottom line.”
Those Boston-area community tournaments — like the Let it Fly Classic, Save Our Streets tournament, Shoe City Classic and many others — draw elite players in the city as well as talented young photographers. They’re among Deitg-Blanchard and Ong’s favorite events to cover, and they’re instilling in this wave of new media a sense of community pride.
“I feel like those events are kind of what make basketball what it is,” Ong said. “Obviously, the high school games are all cool and stuff, and they're all organized, and it's amazing, right? But the community events like Shoe City Classic, Let it Fly — those events, you see a different type of basketball that's not like commonly seen in high school. There's just more energy to it, and you can tell that the community is all a part of it, and they're supportive of the players playing.”
