By K.D. Norris
The adage ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’ is cliché, but any sports fan or photography admirer will tell you without hesitation that, often, art is in the eye of the camera lense.
There is more than 200 examples of photography approaching, achieving and often simply blowing away any doubt that photographs of sports and athletes are museum worthy in the Grand Rapids Art Museum “art” exhibit, “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present”, which opened Friday, Oct. 26.
From the uber-iconic 1965 photo of boxer Muhammad Ali standing over beaten foe Sonny Liston by Neil Leifer, to historic photos of the ordinary athlete and the ideal athletic aesthetic from late 1800s, the exhibit shows again and again the exacting art of the sports photographer.
“You do not get a second chance,” exhibit curator Gail Buckland said to WKTV at a media tour early on opening day. “You have to anticipate. They work as hard as the athletes sometimes. … They don’t want to just take the easy photo. They want something that will last through time. Hence why they are appropriate for the art museum. … they are that universal image.”
The exhibition, which will be on view at the GRAM through Jan. 13, 2019, is said to be the most comprehensive survey of the art of sports photography ever produced, with more than 200 images.
One of the most impressive aspects of the show is the wide-range of black-and-white photographs — which, void the distraction of color, some consider the purest form of photography — with examples spanning from the 19th to the 21st Century.
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, “Who Shot Sports” highlights the “aesthetic, cultural and historical significance of the images and artists in the history of sports since the invention of photography in the 19th century. Visitors will see how the evolution of photographic technology enabled its practitioners to capture the human body in motion as it had never been seen before,” according to supplied information.
“Seeing athletic greatness, we both recognize our personal physical limitations and delight in bodies and minds taken to new heights,” Buckland said in supplied information. “To play and to watch is to be in the moment. Still photographers are masters of moments.”
That idea of putting the viewer into a moment of athletic achievement has dozens of examples but none more so than one of baseball great Derek Jeter, who raised in Kalamazoo before eventually becoming a New York Yankee icon, sliding head first into third base.
Buckland discussed the photo in detail, both as a perfectly captured moment and as an example of modern — and historic — athletes knowing they are the stars of a “show.”
“I see that sports photography is a very important part of sports photojournalism and inherent in photojournalism is a connection to real life,” Buckland said to WKTV. But “athletes, unlike someone walking down the street, expect to be seen. This is performance. In ancient times, it was spectacle. And it is still spectacle. (But often) … they don’t know what they look like until they see themselves in a photograph. And that is a theory of photography too. None of us know what we look like. How we look in a photograph is quite different than we think. But … I do not think it is so much what Derek Jeter looks like as much as what it feels like to slide into the base, to be part of the action.”
The exhibition is divided into nine thematic sections exploring different subjects within the field; The Beginning of Sports Photography; The Decisive Moment; Fans and Followers; Portraits; Behind the Scenes; Vantage Point; In and Out of the Ring; For the Love of the Sports; and the Olympics, featuring images from the first modern Olympics in 1896 to the London Olympics in 2012.
The exhibit also includes a variety of related events and programming, including curator talks, GRAM After Dark: Jock Jams, drop-in tours, art-making workshops and lectures. For a complete list of programming, visit artmuseumgr.org/whoshotsports .
For GRAM’s hours and admission fees visit artmuseumgr.org .
