Time to Hunt: Portraits of Florida Panthers Fans

A portrait series of Florida Panthers hockey fans in Miami — face paint, jerseys and pure devotion, shot as a study of sports fandom and belonging.

When the Florida Panthers turned Miami into a hockey town, the fans became a spectacle of their own. This is a portrait series about them, the face paint, the jerseys, the homemade regalia and the pure, uncynical devotion of people who have decided that a team is part of who they are. It is a study of fandom as identity, shot one fan at a time.

Sports photography usually points at the athletes. I wanted to turn the camera around and photograph the other half of the game: the believers in the stands.

The uniform of devotion

What fascinates me about serious fans is how much they invest in looking the part. A horned helmet and a painted orange beard. A face split down the middle in team colours. A championship ring worn like a wedding band. These are people in costume, but the costume is sincere, an outward declaration of belonging, and that sincerity is what makes them such compelling subjects.

It connects, oddly, to the painted faces of Día de los Muertos: in both, ordinary people transform themselves to belong to something larger, and the transformation is where the portrait lives.

Portrait, not snapshot

The easy version of this is grabbed crowd shots, blurry and frantic. I did the opposite: I pulled fans aside, gave them a moment, and made real portraits, close, deliberate, eye to the lens. Slowing it down turns a rowdy fan into a person, and a person is always more moving than a crowd.

That is the same belief behind my Miami firefighters series: the strongest image of someone in a uniform, whether it is turnout gear or a hockey jersey, is the quiet, human one, not the loudest. Give people a second of stillness and they show you who they are.

“A crowd is a blur. A fan, up close, is a whole story about belonging.”

Miami wears its heart loud

Miami is the perfect city for this. It does nothing quietly, and its sports fandom is as colourful, diverse and unashamed as everything else here. The Panthers gave the city a reason to paint its face, and the range of people who showed up, every age, every background, united by a logo, is a portrait of Miami itself.

It sits alongside my other Florida work, from water polo athletes to the city's firefighters, as another piece of an ongoing portrait of this loud, sunlit place and its people.

Why fan portraits matter

Fandom is one of the last places people are openly, uncoolly passionate in public, and that makes it rich territory. For a photographer, it is a chance to capture genuine emotion without having to manufacture it, and that kind of authentic feeling is exactly what sports brands, teams and editorial clients are always looking for.

These are some of the faces from outside the arena: the paint, the pride, and the joyful, total commitment of Miami's newest hockey believers.