Sports photography emerged as the result of technological developments in photography, the expansion of the illustrated press, and the concomitant proliferation of mass sport during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term is generally understood to refer to photographic coverage of organized sporting events geared toward mass-media distribution, but has also been used to include photography of all forms of athletic and leisure activities—travel, ice skating, motor racing, picnicking—made by professional photographers as well as amateurs for public and personal use.
Sport has long been a central theme in the visual arts. From the springing figures in prehistoric cave paintings, to the idealized athletes in classical Greek and Roman art, to brawling footballers of the present day, artists have been fascinated with action, grace, and competition. In photography, studio portraits of athletes were common from the invention of the daguerreotype, as were hunting still lifes and rustic genre scenes produced by photographers sensitive to traditions in painting. However, with the advent of faster shutters and the dry-plate process, widespread by the 1880s, instantaneity was added to photography's bag of tricks, and suddenly bodies arrested in mid- trajectory came to define a prominent feature of the sports photograph.
The first appearance of such images came by way of science. Almost simultaneously, Eadweard Muybridge in the USA, Étienne-Jules Marey in France, and Ottomar Anschütz in Germany produced rapid-fire sequences of photographs that analysed distinctive movements of men and animals. Although many of these featured athletes performing carefully choreographed sports movements, the purpose of the pictures was wholly scientific; all three inventors envisaged medical or military applications as the end product of their effort.
As instantaneity became a full-blown fad during the 1890s, images of leaping figures became a common sight in amateur photography journals, but these images, too, were defined by other contexts— amateur photographic culture, in this case, which remained enthralled by technological questions into the 1910s. Not until the appearance of the first photographically illustrated sports magazines, which achieved large circulation c. 1900, did sports photography garner the context it needed to become a clearly defined genre within a rapidly expanding and diversifying sphere of photographic activity.
Early sports magazines, like other photographically illustrated periodicals, were made possible by new developments in reproduction and printing technologies. Their variety and breadth of coverage was impressive. There were general sports magazines like La Vie au grand air (Paris), Outing (New York), Amateur Athlete (New York), and Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London); sport-specific magazines, such as Vélo (Paris), Lawn Tennis and Badminton (London), and L'Auto (Paris); and special- occasion sports magazines, like Sport im Bild (Berlin), published to cover the first Olympic Games in 1896. Moreover, general-interest publications like Tatler (London), The Standard (New York), and Je sais tout (Paris) regularly included sports coverage, while the New York Journal had established the institution of ‘the sports page’ by 1897.
The popularity of sports magazines signified sweeping changes in social demographics. With the expansion of the middle and working classes came increased involvement in mass sport. Throughout the 19th century, sports had been mainly the province of elites, with hunting in its various forms the most prevalent. As more people were able to afford leisure, however, sport became a more democratic pastime. It offered relief from industrial tedium, and could be approached through both participation and observation. Importantly, the diversity of sports reflected significant class divisions. Animal fighting, shooting, football, and spectacle sports like bicycle racing were available to the middle and lower classes; while fencing, hunting, rowing, tennis, and sports that required prohibitively expensive equipment, like motoring or even aviation, appealed to the rich. Sports like horse racing and gymnastics, whose appeal ran across class lines, relied upon imposed restrictions—private clubs and special boxes—to maintain distinctions. This was also true for photography, which was commonly considered a sport in its own right; cost and qualitative differences in equipment erected significant social barriers.
With the sports magazine came the sports photographer, a new breed of professional who worked in a documentary mode, but made particular use of new, faster, lightweight cameras capable of seizing movement in the field. A popular model was the Nettel, advertised as the ‘sports camera’, as it came equipped with a special viewfinder called the ‘sports finder’, and had a shutter speed of 1/1, 000 s. Though mostly unknown today, important early sports photographers included E. P. Hahn, Neudin, and Albert Meyer in Germany; Comerio in Italy; Laking, McNeill, Beken, and Holliday in England; Jean and Georges Delton, Jules Beau, and Simons frères in France; Arthur Hewitt, William Jennings, and Louis Alman in America (many more went uncredited). But there were also obvious overlaps with social photography, with some photographers as much (or more) interested in goings-on around the track as in the sports themselves. The British freelance Horace Nicholls, for example, prosperously supplied images of the fashionable crowd at Cowes (yachting), Henley (rowing), and the great horse-racing events at Aintree, Ascot, and Epsom.
Early sports photographers adapted the technological and aesthetic innovations of the 1890s to sports reportage. Besides instantaneity, they explored the expressive potential of the blurred form, the streaked background, and the floating figure, which became a kind of symbol of poetic athleticism in its own right, a distilled vision of human vigour detached from time, space, or the context of a specific event. In this sense, the sports photograph should be seen as the direct legacy of the scientific motion studies conducted by Muybridge et al., but adapted to satisfy the capricious desires of an expanding mass readership. Moreover, sports photographs served as inspiration during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s for avant-garde artists, who discovered in their dynamism and fresh perspectives a visual vocabulary for modernity. This is turn was readily adapted by some photographers, like the football ace Martin Munkácsi, to fashion and advertising.
Amateurs also pursued sports photography. Lartigue in France and Austen in the USA are two famous names in a crowd of thousands worldwide. Crocquet, cricket, and eventually tennis were staples of country-house photography and, as technology permitted, beach sports invaded the holiday album. Amateur photography and amateur sport were often conflated, with amateur photographers classified as a kind of amateur sportsman. Indeed, the amateur movement in photography had its counterpart in the contemporary amateur sports movement; Baron Pierre de Coubertin's reinstitution of the Olympic Games in 1896 was its fullest expression. But links between sport and photography were particularly notable in travel-based activities like bicycling, motoring, and hiking, for which a camera soon became standard equipment. For example, the activities of Marseille's large Sunday hiking club—the so-called buveurs d'air—included photographic lantern lectures, the creation of a photographic archive, and informal training of photographers. Aesthetically, amateur sports photographs tended to express another side of modernism in their approach to depicting movement. Where professionals sought perfect form—muscular athletes demonstrating their skill in a single pose or gesture, often consciously mimicking Greek sculpture—amateurs like Lartigue celebrated the camera's ability to capture awkward, improper, or humorous movements. This reflected changing attitudes toward bodily propriety, and fostered a more casual idea of personal comportment generally.
After the First World War, sports photography continued to proliferate as both public interest in sport and the mass media expanded. The association between sportiness, body culture, and modernity became more pronounced. New sports emerged, or became photographable. Thanks to wartime advances in aviation technology, for example, aerobatics and air races attracted a still larger public than before 1914. Pictures were supplied by daredevils like Willi Ruge, whose career exemplified the overlap, on the one hand, between sports and war photography and, on the other, between the stardom enjoyed by photographers and international sportsmen. In 1930s Germany and Russia, sports became equated with utopian notions of an ideal social order. Gymnastics demonstrations in those countries became symbolic exhibitions of political strength. For spectators, the vision of thousands of limbs moving in precisely choreographed unison created an overwhelming impression of order, unity, and national strength. Photography, with its power to document and abstract, played a central role in the creation and distribution of political propaganda centred around the image of the ‘new man’, a human specimen of perfect physique poised to transform society after the model of rational industry. Indeed, the human body and machinery were commonly conflated, and photography, because of its nature as a mechanical mode of representation, served as the logical mediator. The period's supreme example of the sporting ‘event for photography’ (with strong propaganda undertones) was the 1936 Berlin Olympics, recorded by champions of the genre like Leni Riefenstahl, Lothar Rübelt, and Paul Wolff.
After the Second World War, increasing leisure and affluence in rich countries, and the global spread of television from the 1950s, vastly enlarged the audience for sports. More new activities, like skydiving or windsurfing, appeared, or were practised for the first time in an organized, competitive way. Many others, from ocean racing to bowling—again, mainly thanks to television—attracted unprecedented popular interest and large sums of money from sponsors. The result was a greatly expanded market for sports photographers, since television failed to outdo the still camera's ability to freeze the dramatic moment. New mass-circulation journals like the American Sports Illustrated (1954), weekly supplements, and the sports pages of daily newspapers developed an insatiable demand for images, which for sports like soccer, rugby, golf, and athletics were also saleable worldwide.
Technology continued to exert much greater influence than on most other branches of the medium. The 35 mm SLR established its supremacy for most applications. Colour dominated increasingly from the 1970s. Improved film emulsions, lenses, film-transport mechanisms, and shutter speeds (upwards of 1/8, 000 s by c.2000) made it possible to obtain shots that would earlier have been unthinkable. So did underwater housings and remote-control devices. In some sports, such as surfing, skydiving or dinghy racing, photography is possible only in the thick of the action, requiring equipment that is both rugged and highly automated. As with the first autofocus systems, early digital cameras were too slow for most sports. But within less than a decade they were practically ubiquitous.
Technology apart, the basic requirements for a sports photographer have remained constant: concentration, patience, stamina, rapid reflexes, and intimate knowledge of the sport. In the emotion-hungry environment of the modern media, however, an eye for pain and exultation, for players and spectactors ‘gutted’ or ‘over the moon’ (preferably with the moon visible in the picture) is also essential. Certain sports, like Formula One racing or ocean yachting, favour specialization, although some late 20th-century masters—the veteran George Silk (b. 1916), Walter Looss Jr., Co Rentmeester, Neil Leifer—captured astounding pictures across a wide range of activities. Other individuals, such as Larry Fink and James Fox in relation to boxing, have concentrated on documentary coverage of a sporting subculture as much as on the sport itself.
Sports photography is extremely demanding and competitive. The number of full-time jobs—e.g. as newspaper staff photographers—is tiny relative to the market's size. The cost of equipment, insurance, travel, and the hire of facilities (e.g. helicopters) is high. Access to many major events is restricted by security considerations and, often, sponsorship arrangements. All this puts the resources and leverage of big agencies and other groups at a premium, and makes life hard for the freelance and beginner. Finally, the sporting world is not just the domain of the sports photographer. Late 20th-century sporting contests all too often became occasions for other kinds of event: hooliganism, terrorism, or sensational accidents. Meanwhile, activities ‘around the track’, today involving celebrity sportsmen as much as celebrity spectators, attract photojournalists and paparazzi.
— Kevin Moore/Robin Lenman
See also marine and nautical photography.Bibliography
- Lattes, J., Sportphotographie, 1860-1960 (1977).
- Dugan, E. (ed.), This Sporting Life, 1878-1991 (1992).
- ‘Body/Sport/Image’,
Photogeschichte ,62 (1996). - Fink, L., Boxing (1997).
- Tomlinson, R., Shooting H2O (2000).
- Wombell, P., Sportscape: The Evolution of Sports Photography (2000)
