Sports Through the Lens

In 2011, art historian Lynda Nead asserted that sports photography “has been completely overlooked in the history of photography” (“Stilling the Punch: Boxing, Violence and the Photographic Image,” Journal of Visual Culture 10 [3]: 309). In the years since Nead's paradigm-shifting writing, promising work by visual culture scholars such as Mike O'Mahony, Jennifer Doyle, and Tamar Garb has begun to promote the importance of visual histories of athletics to scholars whose work increasingly transcends rigid disciplinary boundaries. Now, Maureen M. Smith, Daniel A. Nathan, and Sarah K. Fields have added a crucial contribution to this emerging dialogue between the history of photography and the history of sport. Their Sports Through the Lens: Essays on 25 Iconic Photographs brings together a variety of contributions from the fields of sport history and media studies. Each author uses their essay as an opportunity to reflect—in accessible, personable prose—on a single photograph in only a few pages. The volume is an exciting collection of essays about “iconic” snapshots of moments in sport history. It successfully introduces sport historians to visual culture methods as both fields continue to grow and overlap with other disciplines.The book itself is visually striking. Each essay begins with a large color reproduction of the image in question. Image captions, however, are left to the end of the book. The essays are arranged in chronological order, with the earliest photograph from 1890, and the most recent from 2015. The editors acknowledge in the introduction that many of the photographers whose works are examined are professional, white, male photojournalists from the United States. Indeed, it is conspicuous that so many of the contributors chose to write about works by Walter Iooss Jr., Neil Leifer, and other male image-makers working for mainstream sports media conglomerates. The result is a certain degree of homogeneity in subject: a great deal of Major League Baseball and American football, with only a few authors looking to sport outside the United States, women and child athletes, and athletes of color. Strength sport is a particularly notable omission.The book's diverse essays make clear that engaging with the myriad relationships among sports, photography, and history is not abstract but deeply tangible, productive, and accessible. There remain some difficult disciplinary questions which this book begins to address. For example, how might the history of photography add to our understanding of pivotal moments in sport history? The entire volume argues for the power of visual material, a fact that seems to counter one of the opening arguments that “a photograph that no one looks at and reads does no work in the world. It barely exists” (3). Each author has successfully indicated that a photograph possesses agency from the moment it is taken; by virtue of coming into existence, it has interacted with many people. Indeed, several authors engage Gary Osmond's 2010 claim that materiality is a crucial tool for sport historians: it requires them to consider image content not as neutral and passive, but rather powerful, affective, and contingent upon the form in which it appears to us at any given moment (“Photographs, Materiality and Sport History: Peter Norman and the 1968 Mexico City Black Power Salute,” Journal of Sport History 37 [1]: 124). Even if it is not subsequently seen, its erasure is still important and speaks to the politics of the archive, censorship (deliberate or inadvertent), cultural priorities, and aesthetic norms. These are all topics upon which the contributing authors touch.Some notable essays focus on the image in question and move outward, considering the photograph itself as an object with power and agency: its representational technology, its formal features, and its content, contextualized by contemporaneous social and political histories. Jonathan Finn, Ashley Brown, Carlo Rotella, Terry Ann Scott, Russell Field, Chris Elzey, Bernardo Ramirez Rios, and Timothy B. Spears provide particularly nuanced visual readings of their chosen images that help viewers engage with them as complicated and politically loaded historical documents. These documents offer distinct visual unease and/or pleasure as encountered now, years, decades, or more than a century removed from the photographs’ original printing. Rotella asks readers to consider what the photograph omits, for this itself reveals much about parallel narratives, historical complexity, and issues of objectivity and truth.All the essays elucidate that the cultural primacy our society awards to sight is crucial to widespread appreciation of striking sports photojournalism. We enjoy looking at images that have a punctum—an emotional, affective pull—and are conditioned to believe in the veracity and authority of that which we can see. The editors offer wise words from historian Alan Trachtenberg: photographs are not simple depictions but are instead constructions. This is an important piece of advice for all sports historians aiming to use photographs as material evidence, yet it requires even more unpacking. Studying photographs demands understanding that they are not merely illustrations, not merely “proof” of an event or narrative history. Working with photographs requires considering how they were made, who took them and why, who viewed them and where, and how viewers continue to engage with them in different capacities than their original contexts. The editors acknowledge these facts but also give allowances to sport historians who may still want to engage with photographs as narrative aids, acknowledging how irresistible it can be to have a photograph pull us down a rabbit hole of storytelling, personal recollection, and emotional celebration. This is ultimately where much of the book's power lies: it is deeply accessible regardless of one's facility with visual culture approaches, invites quick, episodic engagement, and begs to be assigned in undergraduate classes on sport history

Discipline · Field (mathematics · History of photography · Panorama · Photography · Subject (documents · Variety (cybernetics · Visual culture · American Sports and Literature · Photography and Visual Culture · Sports, Gender, and Society