The history of sports photography is closely related to the trends of sports gaining popularity throughout human history. Photography technology from the early 19th century onward leapt forward and helped an emerging medium, sports journalism.
Inspiration from athletics and sport in art can certainly be seen in the work of the ancient Greek masters of sculpture, however this type of expression was not as prevalent in modern sporting venues until the invention of photographic processes of wet collodion and dry plate. These processes allowed studio images to be posed on glass plates and tin types, but were not “fast” enough for the “stop action” images we are used to seeing today.
As the 19th century was drawing to a close, in the 1880s scientific studies of movement of athletes in action were produced in the United States and Germany, the technology was not yet considered in the sports field. This all changed with the advancement of photography and sports magazines in the latter part of the century. When the first sports magazines began to appear around 1900, the public became increasingly interested in sports imagery, which often included images of players on the tennis court, playing golf, or hunting wildlife.
In the history of sports photography, early contributors were more concerned with the activities of the country’s elite, but at the end of World War I, readers of sports magazines began to take an interest in American professional baseball and tennis athletes. . Most of these early images were of featured players in posed situations, giving you a sense of action. Baseball players posed with bat in hand at home plate, teams lined up for group shots, etc., yet the “action” shot was not yet widely seen.
By the 1930s, more and more images of athletes in action were appearing in magazines, aided by camera systems that allowed photographers shutter speeds of up to 1/1000th of a second. This gave way to styles that highlighted blurred subjects suggestive of movement and “stop action” images of the athlete in action. Photographers began to adopt distinctive styles and the popularity of the genre began to grow rapidly as the public began to expect the thrill of seeing their favorite athletes in ‘action’.
In 1954, Sports Illustrated, the acclaimed compendium of sports and athletics, was released, and suddenly the position of sports photographer became even more entrenched in the public eye. The magazine highlighted the exploits of professional and amateur athletes from around the world, increasing the need for the art form and those who practiced it. By this point, technology had more or less caught up with demand, with the advent of small, compact single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras and the fast shutter speeds offered on models. The history of sports photography is closely tied to lens technology, which has also advanced to offer the photographer a wide variety of methods to compress perspective and use depth of field to dramatic effect.
