The girl with the oar started moving… Sports photojournalism in America. Part I. End of XIX – first half of XX century

Over the last century and a half the importance of sports in the world has grown at an astonishing pace – from the almost closed, elitist clubs available only to the highly educated and wealthy in the 19th century, to the mass enthusiasm for sports in every corner of the globe. At the same time sports journalism and its important part – sports photography – is actively developing. Exactly in sports photography is in demand like nowhere else: to visually show the moment of a goal scored, winners finish or emotions of jubilant athletes and spectators is much more important than to write several paragraphs of text about it.

Thanks to RIA Novosti group

for the photos made available for publication.

1. g. Zelma/RIA Novosti. The first gymnasts. A boy does an exercise on a homemade horizontal bar. 1924

Sports photography has always been at the forefront of technological developments in photography. Many of the techniques photographers use in documentary, commercial, or art photography were originally discovered, tried, and used in sports. It is often sports photographers who make important improvements and innovations and who “test them out” at sports competitions. And nowadays manufacturers of professional equipment are trying to produce new reportage cameras on the eve of major sporting events.

Sports photography in the American Empire

In the 19th century there appears such a notion as leisure, a free pastime not aimed at ensuring one’s own existence or making a profit. It was then that interest in sports events began to appear and such a notion as “sports” generally emerged. Originally, only the very rich could participate in it, so the first sports were very aristocratic: horse racing, golf, wrestling which was very popular at that time, later cycling, skating and so on.

2. Ivan Shagin/RIA Novosti. The Sports Parade on Red Square. 1932

Photographers at that time were severely limited by the technical possibilities of photography: bulky cameras and slow shutter speeds made it almost impossible to do event-based, reportage photography. Only towards the end of the century, with the appearance of the first “handheld” cameras, did photographers begin to take pictures of events on the streets. But the demand and need for reportage shots was quite clearly felt. For example, as early as 1893, the Niva magazine published one of the first illustrated reports about sports events in Saint Petersburg.

In the photographs of that time we cannot yet speak of the transmission of dynamics, expressive phases of motion or well-balanced composition. For now we will evaluate the fact of making a “snapshot” of a sports photo, fixation of a real event, not a staged one.

By the way, pictures of athletes finishing appeared even then. Photography very quickly defined itself as an excellent documentator of what was going on, and this is very important in sports.

4. v. Krasinskaya/RIA Novosti. Discus thrower Maria Shamanova. 1928

The “Leica” and mass sports in the USSR

In the twentieth century, the attitude toward sport has changed dramatically. It became of interest to a huge audience and gradually became an important phenomenon in public life. This was characteristic of many countries at the time: the international Olympic movement was actively developing, mass sports became very popular in America at the beginning of the century, and sports journalism literally flourished.

In the USSR, sport not only became a way of spending leisure time, but also acquired an important ideological meaning: it symbolized the emancipation of the masses, the dawn of a new era, and a change in the general paradigm of the perception of man and society.

“… After the revolution, people’s breakthrough to sport was also a social liberation… “Now we too are athletes!”At that time, they were especially fond of mass rhythmic marches, group pyramids. A person liberated himself, his body… Sports had the character of collective action” From memories of Varvara Rodchenko, 1977 .

The creation of a new visual image of the world required new visual solutions. Anastigmatic lenses became widespread at that time, providing a clear picture without distortion throughout the frame, and roll film replaced single plates, allowing the photographer to take several pictures at a time. And the invention of lightweight rangefinder cameras Leica is the best known of them gives the photographer mobility unavailable before.

All of this influenced the very way photographers “saw”. Photographers actively took to the streets and began to look for new variations on already familiar subjects.

3. v. Krasinskaya/RIA Novosti. Pole vaulter Militsa Goldobina. 1928

The composition of the frame itself underwent great changes: sharp angles appeared, making the shots more dynamic, the composition was tighter, and the important moments in the story were distributed across the whole plane of the frame.

One of the most interesting things for a photographer at that time was the ability to express the actual movement of the subject. Mostly through fragmented composition and getting as close to the subject as possible. It was like “copying” the fragmentary perception of an object’s movement by the human eye. The same period also includes the first attempts to capture motion by experimenting with shutter speed.

Slightly blurred objects because of the slow shutter speed, or walkover shots along the jumper’s movement are still used in sports photography, and back then, this was basically the only way to get the most important moment when the speed of the jumper was at its highest.

An important feature of sports photography in the 1930s was the very organization of photographer’s work at the competitions. The photographer was hardly restricted either in the place where the picture was taken or in his movements in the field. He might have been standing right behind the gate, behind the backs of the athletes during the start. If it was soccer or similar sports, the photographer tried to follow the movement of the game, anticipating from which point it would be most advantageous to shoot a particular scene.

That’s why photography technique was completely different back then: sports were photographed with lenses with medium focal length, trying to get as close as possible to the subject. The use of short lenses telephoto lenses weren’t invented at the time, and they weren’t even necessary , and sometimes even wide-angle lenses, gave a very different perspective and depth of field, so sports photos of those days are fundamentally different from today’s images.

5. d. Debabov/RIA Novosti. The Znamensky brothers at the start. 1935

Thus, early 20th-century sports photography made a big step towards the development of speed in capturing events. It is still difficult for a photographer to capture the “decisive moment” – the striking visual image of an event. But there are already quite real possibilities to capture the most important subject moment of a competition an athlete’s jump, the start of horses in a race, a goal scored . But this demands an enormous exertion, concentration, experience and perfected technical skills from photographers.

With completely manual camera settings sharpness, shutter speed, aperture, film rewind the very fact of creating a technically high-quality sharp picture of the desired moment becomes a success. But the photographer at this time is limited in his search for interesting artistic solutions. That is why many sports photos, successful for their time, today seem unfinished and unthinkable to us in modern periodicals: severed heads, legs and arms, mottled backgrounds, crossing figures in the background – all this is not yet under the photographer’s control when taking pictures, and most often it is even beyond his attention.