If you arrive in Melbourne in January, even if you don't follow tennis, you'd be hard-pressed not to figure out something big was happening a short walk from the center of town. As you enter Melbourne Park, the blue courts and blue-lined public areas give one the feeling of being enveloped by a concrete ocean, filled with fans crowding matches, catching up with friends, listening to live music, and drinking a few beers.
It's not intimate, but it is relaxed. Still, it hardly compares to where the tournament was held before it moved in 1988, at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club, in a suburb of Melbourne. Roger Gould first photographed the Australian Open in the mid-'70s. At the time, he was shooting mostly record covers and music promotion. Toyota, one of his advertising clients—and eventually a major sponsor of the Women's Tennis Association—asked Gould to take a few photographs for them.
"The event had a wonderful ambience and warm, very hot days, people with shirts off getting a suntan in the stands, areas for schoolchildren down the grass at the edge of center court," he said. "In all, the feeling of a very pleasant time at the tennis."