Page 174 - Sport Culture and the Media

FRAMED AND MOUNTED || 155

context (that is, containing still photographic images of both male and female
athletic bodies). Can it be proposed that this is an instance of significant
change in the differential imaging of sportsmen and sportswomen? It is useful
to examine this case of bringing sports photography out of the sports pages
through the ‘art’ publication to the popular magazine in some detail. A
selection of the images was carried in the Australian edition of the popular
‘gossip’ magazine Who Weekly (June 1996) under the front-page banner ‘TOP
ATHLETES BARE ALL IN A CONTROVERSIAL ALBUM’ (the magazine
helped to generate part of this controversy by being banned from some super-
market chains). Of the four images presented on page 1, two were of men and
two of women, only one of which was an action shot (a male sprinter). Of the
three non-action shots, the men’s were of torso and head, but the women’s
involved the whole body (that is, breasts, thighs, and so on). In the contents
page, nude images of a female athlete (one in silhouette) were used, alongside
an inset of four (clothed) women from Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film of the
1936 ‘Nazi Olympics’, Olympia. Riefenstahl’s work is discussed in a short
accompanying article entitled ‘The Athletic Aesthetic’, presumably to demon-
strate that naked athletes have been filmed for many decades (in the case of
this story, the only nude still images shown are of four distant men). Yet, of the
twelve naked athletes selected for the ‘photospread’, eight are women. The only
‘full frontal’ shots (although by no means a majority of total images) are of
women, with men being carefully posed or cropped, or using the traditional
recourse to a strategically placed object interposed between viewer and penis –
here a pair of oars in one shot and a large fish in another. Most athletes (male
and female) are not shown in motion (although there is a spectacular shot of a
female beach volleyballer hanging from a rope above a waterfall), but all the
males are standing – only women are shown in reclining positions, with one of a
woman water polo player closely resembling ‘soft-core style’. Only one image –
of two female divers – features any person-to-person contact, in this case with
one on top of the other in a manner that connotes lesbian imagery (another soft
and hardcore pornographic staple).
In reading, then, this selection for popular consumption of nude images
taken from a self-consciously artistic publication, it can be suggested that there
are persistent differences (probably largely unconscious) in representation of
sportsmen and sportswomen that carry over even into areas of apparently equal
treatment. The text that surrounds the Black + White/Who Weekly photospread
stressed sympathetically that ‘Posing nude is not something these athletes do
every day – training relentlessly for the Atlanta Olympics in July is more their
speed. And with an impressive list of victories behind them, these champions
are ready to take on all their equally pumped peers’ (p. 30). Yet, while seeming
to try to ‘do the right thing’ in terms of gender equality, more attention is paid