DimeLabs — 1987 Park Photoshoot · Unreleased AJ5 Prototype

Front · Original Carl V. Sissac B&W press print

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Back · Carl V. Sissac copyright stamp

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Back — Carl V. Sissac stamp and personal signature

Sissac's pencil signature also visible in the lower right corner — a personal mark that appears on select prints from his archive. This is the fourth Sissac print in the DimeLabs Type 1 collection, alongside the 1984–85 Rookie Dunk, the Empty Arena rookie portrait, and the Jordan Dunks on Sam Bowie print.

The most unusual photograph in the collection

Every other Type 1 photograph in the DimeLabs collection was taken inside an arena — press photography of a man playing basketball in front of crowds. This one is different. Carl Sissac took Jordan to a park. Trees in the background. Steps beneath him. No crowd, no court, no scoreboard. Just Jordan in his Bulls uniform, airborne, with a basketball — wearing shoes that did not yet exist for the public.

Collectors who specialize in Jordan sneaker history have identified the footwear as a prototype of the Air Jordan 5 — a shoe that would not commercially release until 1990, three years after this photograph was taken. What is visible on Jordan's feet in this 1987 park is not something anyone could buy. It was a design in progress, worn during a photoshoot by the man it was being designed for.

Only four images from this photoshoot have ever surfaced. Carl Sissac, who photographed Jordan in arenas throughout his early career, took him outside — to a park, with trees and steps and no crowd — and captured something that exists nowhere else. The pose. The prototype shoes. The stillness of a man who was about to change the world, in a park, before anyone knew.

— DimeLabs · 1987 Park Photoshoot Type 1 · PSA Cert #85357033

This photograph is also from 1987 — the year Jordan won the Slam Dunk Contest with the legendary free throw line dunk. The same arms-spread, ball-raised pose visible here was the pose the world was about to see at the contest. Sissac may have been photographing Jordan in preparation for that moment, or simply capturing the man as he was — a basketball player in a park, trying things, before the world caught up.

This is the seventeenth and final Type 1 photograph in the DimeLabs collection. It is also the fourth Carl V. Sissac original — making DimeLabs the most complete private repository of Sissac Jordan photography in existence. The collection begins in August 1984 at the Olympics and ends here, in a park, in 1987, with a shoe that hadn't been invented yet.