Page 162 - Sport Culture and the Media

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how the world is (or how the photographer thinks it should be). The most
important object in sports photography is sport’s prime instrument, the human
body. The bodies of sportspeople are closely observed through striking images
that draw their power not merely from the drama of action, but also by con-
necting the imaged body to wider social issues and identities. Hence the body
in sports photography is always invested with a wider representational role as
sexualized, gendered, racialized, and so on.
It is necessary in pursuit of the task of ‘unveiling’ the media sports text to
analyse the ‘rules’ of sports photography, the kinds of social relations and
characteristics offered to the viewer as normal or abnormal, remarkable or
banal. Given that the photograph is also usually accompanied by headlines
and captions that help ‘anchor and relay’ the ‘photographic message’ (Barthes
1977), the text needs to be examined in its totality (it should not be assumed in
advance, however, that image, headline, caption and text together form a con-
sistent communicative ‘fit’). As with the written sports media, still photographs
can be classified according to genres and sub-genres, each with different
qualities, motives and implied viewerships. ‘Secondary’ still photographic
sports texts can also be found through the use of images and visual metaphors
(such as in advertising) that set popular knowledge of and feeling for sport to
work for another purpose. It is the ‘primary’ still photographic sports text of
the captured sporting moment, though, that first commands our attention – the
image that transfixes the reader as they go to turn the page through its sheer
visual and emotional power, its capacity to make us wish that we were there –
and, even if we were, that we, too, had seen it that way.

Caught in the act

Still photography is, as observed above, a form of communication that relies on
the notion of ‘capture’ – frozen for all time is a gesture, an expression, incident
or landscape. It is conducted like any other communicative act through pro-
cesses of selection; many ‘snaps’ may be taken but only one shot selected out of
the multiple variations of angle, focus, composition and light. Even when the
image is caught, it can be altered in many ways to improve its impact. Fiske
(1982: 109) notes, for example, how a newspaper’s picture editor cropped and
shaped an incident from a ‘riot’ in London’s Notting Hill to enhance a con-
centrated sense of confrontation by cutting out ‘extraneous’ details of houses,
trees and bystanders. He quotes the approving comments of the editor of
another newspaper, Harold Evans, that the picture ‘was the result of perceptive
picture editing as well as of resourceful photography’ (Fiske 1982: 110) by
eradicating signs of domesticity, nature and other such manifestations of