Shadows on concrete, children on a staircase in Mexico, silhouettes on a beach at sunset, a pitch with the New York skyline in the background. In The Beautiful Game, French photographer Valérie Jardin travels across France, Spain, Mexico and the United States with a single thread running through it all: football as an everyday gesture, universal, present everywhere and always recognisable.

This is not sports photography in the traditional sense. Jardin does not photograph champions or stadiums, but the most authentic version of the game: the one that takes place on streets, in squares, on sand, between the buildings of a city. Every shot is candid, captured through her 23mm lens without ever interrupting the moment. It is the tradition of street photography applied to a subject that, more than any other, crosses geographical, generational and cultural boundaries without the need for translation.

The result is a black-and-white series that abandons spectacle in search of something more subtle: a child sitting on the ground focused on controlling the ball, bicycle wheels framing a shot in a Spanish square, a football goal on a French beach seen through the net. Images that do not celebrate victory, but presence, leisure, a sense of belonging to something shared.