Page 163 - Sport Culture and the Media

144 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

‘normalcy’. Holland states that the truth claims of such ‘photo-journalism’ rely
on the concepts of ‘neutrality and objectivity’, which, if handled in a dubious
way, may provoke suspicions of viewer manipulation and textual fabrication
and to the asking of questions like:

Was that starving baby separated from its mother so that it looked even
more forlorn in the picture? Was that man waving a stick really shouting at
the policeman or simply telling the photographer to get out of the way?
Was there help at hand for those desperate people just beyond the edge of
the frame?
(Holland 1998: 418)

This is not to argue that there is no correspondence between what the camera
caught and what was happening at that moment, but merely that many tech-
niques are available to photographers that are ethically dubious and, whatever
the motives of the photographer, a framed, two-dimensional image can never be
‘the thing itself’. However realistic a photograph might be in style and effective
in delivering a feeling of ‘having been there’, then, it is, like all other media
texts, a manufactured representation of the real. Furthermore, as Becker argues,
the picture itself is only one component of the text:
Photographs attain meaning only in relation to the settings in which they
are encountered. These settings include . . . the historically constructed
discourses in which specific topics and styles of photography are linked
to particular tasks or patterns of practice (Sekula 1984: 3–5). The
photograph’s setting also includes the concrete, specific place it appears
and how it is presented. In the newspaper, photographs have no meaning
independent of their relationship to the words, graphic elements and other
factors in the display which surround and penetrate them.
(Becker 1992: 144)
In ‘taking in’ a photograph, then, we are also exposed to the caption, head-
line, the positioning of the item in relation to other items, the reputation of
the publication and, importantly, we respond to the subjects with which
they deal according to our own ‘reading positions’ as male or female, black or
white, young or old, working class or bourgeois, and so on. When looking
at a sports photograph, our response to an image of a despondent athlete will
be largely conditioned by our relationship to them, encouraging sympathy,
hostility, indifference or glee according to our sporting affiliations and loyalties.
In this way, looking at a photograph can be regarded as one social construction
coming into contact with another in a perpetual cycle of producing, modifying
and circulating meaning. It is necessary to make these brief, preliminary
comments because the ‘action’ sports photograph works through seeking to