Fantasy Life uses the game of baseball to unpack the role of luck and uncertainty, and heroism and vulnerability in American life. Little league prodigies, high school All-Stars, college superstars who get drafted into minor league baseball lead us valiantly into the series.

And yet, getting drafted is just the beginning of their journey. The majority of these former stars spend years bouncing around the minor leagues from team to team. Sometimes they’re on the roster for a day, or a matter of hours. It’s a chaotic life filled with endless bus rides, cheap hotels, and game after game, each player determined to grab a spot on a major league roster. These photographs track their rise and eventual release from baseball over 15 years, following them into homelessness, coal mining, coaching, insurance sales and other second acts.

America’s striving culture has its roots in the nineteenth-century westward expansion of the country. These baseball players are raised with an irresistible and irrational desire for greatness in the same way that the settlers assumed that they would go out and settle the West.

In Fantasy Life, the baseball players are seeking to overcome ordinariness and achieve a level of individuality that approaches a meaningful life. They sacrifice job security and financial stability to chase a greater reward. However, the reality is that only 6 percent of those drafted ever make the majors. More often than not, the destiny they’re chasing remains a fantasy.

Baseball and tintypes came into the world 11 years apart and this series acknowledges that historical overlap through its unique tintypes featuring bodies in motion.

The series also includes gelatin silver selenium-toned prints and pigment prints, and two sculptures accompany the photographs.

One sculpture is a tower of shelled peanuts with 6% of them painted gold, providing a visual representation of those players who reach their dream of athletic success. The second sculpture, Net Impact, which debuted at SFMOMA, is made of the players’ surgically-removed bone spurs (caused by repetitive motion). The spurs show a constellation of body parts damaged by the dedicated effort it takes to be number one - in sports or in other areas of American culture- and the true physical cost that is borne by that pursuit.