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throughout newspapers and magazines. These are the aforementioned
‘secondary media sports texts’ (including some of the images discussed above),
which have a less direct relationship with the practice of sport, but nonetheless
draw on sports news, celebrities and mythologies. It might be objected that,
in the strict sense, they use sport rather than constitute sports photography
per se, so calling into question the precise characteristics of the still sports
image.

The uses of sport in photography

In this chapter, I have concentrated on two types of sports photograph. The first
and most unequivocally sporting is the action photograph, but we have seen,
second, that pictures of sportsmen and women take many forms, such as pin-up
and aesthetic images. These photographs rely on representing recognizable
aspects of sport, like the body of a famous athlete or ‘signs’ of sport such as
uniform or equipment. There are other types of sports photograph to be
examined that do not concentrate on the bodies of athletes in motion or in
repose, but which take in the wider context of the event by putting to the fore
the crowd or the venue. These ‘atmosphere’ or ‘ambient’ shots are most com-
monly found in the sports sections of broadsheet newspapers and in specialist
magazines that have the space to present sumptuous photo-essays of major
sporting occasions and the many photographic subjects that surround them.
Sports images, then, appear both in the parts of the media clearly designated for
them and also spread far beyond the sports pages into the realm of general news
and human interest stories. The ‘sports action’ emphasis is reduced to such an
extent in such cases that the photograph becomes a hybrid of sports photo,
‘society’ image, ‘mood’ shot, and so on.
Let us take, for example, the British tabloid The Sun newspaper’s ‘exclusive’
front page story ‘Our Love’, in which pop singer Spice Girl Victoria Adams
(professionally known as Posh Spice) and Manchester United and England
soccer player David Beckham display their engagement rings and discuss their
‘Romance of the Decade’ (Coulson 1998). All of pages 2 and 3, traditionally
areas of ‘quality’ newspapers that carry ‘serious’ news, are taken up with inter-
views with the happy couple and several more photographs, while the centre
pages are devoted to more photographs and pronouncements on the union by
Debbie Frank, ‘Sun Love Astrologer’. Clearly, sport is an important element of
this ‘photostory’ – the engagement of a leading footballer and a member of a
world famous pop group is a publicist’s wet dream – but its qualifications as
a media sports text are attenuated by the lack of direct concentration on sport
itself. Posh’n’Becks have before and since been a well on which the media can