Page 161 - Sport Culture and the Media

5 FR AMED AND MOUNTED: SPORT

THROUGH THE PHOTOGR APHIC E Y E

In newspapers and magazines images of sportsmen in action proliferate,
but we constantly see symbols of sportswomen’s femininity (and par-
ticularly images that are saturated with sexuality), rather than pictures
of female athleticism . . . For example, a female athlete posing with a
male athlete where he has a dominant stance and she a submissive one;
photographs of male athletes surrounded by female admirers; photo-
graphs of female athletes crying with elation or embraced by husbands or
boyfriends; in situations and poses that have no apparent connection with
sport; in domestic contexts, pregnant or with children; and photographs
of female athletes highlighting hairdos, make-up, and clothing.
(Jennifer Hargreaves 1993b: 62)

Introduction: still sport

The epic moments of sport, for all the ready availability of prose, poetry and
the moving image, are most memorably captured by still photography. The
‘frozen in time’ sight of the instant of a famous victory or gesture is perhaps the
most potent of all media sports texts, able to convey historical weight, emotion
and a sense of the unique. One of the most memorable is the ‘black power’
protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the victory dais at the 1968
Mexico Olympics (Given 1995; Johnson and Roediger 2000; Guttmann 2002),
which, by the 1990s, had become incorporated into corporate leisurewear
marketing campaigns as images of funky black radical chic (McKay 1995). Like
all media texts, sports photographs work through a particular ordering of
signs and codes that are part aesthetic, part ideological. They are not innocent
records of events – through selection, composition and manipulation (crop-
ping, ‘burning’, ‘brushing’, and so on in traditional photography and computer
commands in digital photography), sports photographs offer up an account of