Sports Photography

With all my thinking about functional photography, I couldn’t help but think about sports photography and whether or not it could ever be art. Sports photography, almost more than any other form of photography, is tied to specific events and is tied down by the requirement that it be true. We look to photographs to settle on-field controversies and stop motion so that we can see the detail of the action.

There’s a reason why the only sports photographs I’ve ever seen in an art museum are large-scale Gursky prints which, while they show action, aren’t about the action on the field.

EM Arena, Amsterdam I, by Andreas Gursky

While I wouldn’t call Gursky’s soccer shots functional, they do demonstrate my previous conclusion about how functional photography has to lose enough details so we can fill in our own. It doesn’t matter what game the photo is of,* as a fan’s-eye view, we can fill in our own experiences.

*Though I do remember studying and identifying the players—yes, the big bald Dutch center back is Jaap Stam.

Besides the Gursky photos, I can’t think of any sports action photo which would be considered art. Heck, even non-action non-portrait is tough. Nat Fein’s Babe Bows Out which won the 1949 Pulitzer is close since it requires almost no supporting text or context for most Americans to understand and, while not technically* a portrait, it’s pretty close to being one.

*For many people, portraits are strictly posed photos of people’s faces. These people have never seen Avedon’s portrait of Andy Warhol.

Now, I have seen plenty of artsy* sports photos. I tend to notice them more during the Olympics where photographers of the more obscure events often end up favoring more graphic compositions or exposure experiments** which don’t tell a story but serve more as examples of what makes these other sports interesting. I’m not sure why I haven’t seen these kind of photos become art yet. Maybe it’s because the sports are so obscure that most of us can’t fill in the missing details. Or maybe it’s just bias against functional photography.

*Artsy in this case meaning that the photo is taken for aesthetic reasons and not to tell a story. 

**Longer exposures, deliberate over/under exposure, or anything else which is technically wrong for sports.

As with government documents, I suspect that the correct edit could result in a fantastic exhibition of sports photography as art where, instead of reading stories about specific events, we experience a different trip through the athletic world.

Nostalgia

I’ve lived through an interesting period of time when it comes to sports and how we cover and perceive them. I’ve tended to consider most of my changing perceptions on sport to be related to my own maturation. A twelve-year-old kid will think about sports very differently than a 30-year-old adult. But there’s more going on as I’m finding that I’m not the only one with these feelings.

For example, I’m finding international competition to be increasingly meaningless. The Olympics, for starters, is now endless, prepackaged, tape-delayed coverage. So much so that I find myself just not caring about the events anymore. Plus, since all the athletes are professionals in constant competition against each other anyway, I no longer understand what makes the Olympic games unique.

At least with team sports, international competition is still appealing. Reorganizing teams every couple years for a summer tournament provides a nice change of pace and different way to see things. While the quality of play may not be as good as the best professional teams are capable of,* because many fans still pick their rooting interests based on where their compatriots play, it’s nice to have them all on the same team every once in a while.

*though the massive overlap between Spain and Barcelona comes pretty close.

It’s not clear how long international competition will remain appealing. The world is getting smaller and it’s increasingly likely that people will migrate toward following club sports—or at least the international superstar players—instead of international teams. I’m not ready to throw in the towel regarding all international competition* but I do agree with the concept that there is something inherently nostalgic about it. And that it’s sort of the last bastion of the concept of pure amateur sport.

*If you subscribe to The Classical, there’s a great post on this.

Which is what scares me. Once we start trying to preserve a sense of what sport should be, or used to be, we run the risk of screwing it up the way we’ve screwed up college sports. It’s not enough to say “be careful of what you wish for” since we also have to think about how to maintain that wish. Holding on to concepts like “amateur” long after it’s stopped describing anyone is not useful. “International” is soon to be the same type of term. Players won’t always play for their passports. Many don’t already. And it’s increasingly obvious that many of the best players are not playing for the best national teams (right now).

We know too much now. We know all the dirty laundry behind the scenes. We talk to the players on Twitter. They talk to us. We know everything is for sale. Sports is global. The audience is global. It’s no longer about how my local team is doing—assuming I even follow my local team…

But there’s hope. Look at a lot of what Major League Baseball’s doing for example. Retro is in. As it should be. Classic uniforms. Classic ballparks. After a couple decades of multipurpose doughnut stadiums and attempts to modernize the look, Baseball has realized that it’s really about embracing the past.* For Americans, Baseball is about nostalgia. Heck, it’s a game which is still best experienced on the radio.

*I wish it would go further and roll back interleague play, the wild card, and the DH but I doubt that will ever happen now.

International sports should take a page from the same book. Embrace the past and find ways of evoking it. Become unabashedly retro and make us remember what we liked about it all when we were kids.

The ease of being a local

When people ask me whether I’m a Warriors fan, I tend to shrug and say “when they let me.” With the 49ers over the past dozen years, my answer has been “it’s been tough.”* I haven’t followed the Giants with any real passion for almost a decade.** I half keep an eye on the Sharks. I don’t follow Stanford as much as I used to. And I don’t follow the Earthquakes at all.***

*Easier recently.

**Stupid Barry Bonds coverage was so bad that Giants news stories were only concerned with how Bonds did and rarely mentioned anything else about the team.

***I probably would care more if their jersey sponsor was anyone but Amway.

Yet if asked about most of these teams, I will self-identify as a fan. I’ll always have a general sense how they’re doing. And who the key players are. And I’m familiar with the team history and legacy in the area. I’ve had decades to soak all this up so it’s part of who I am. When things pick up and the Warriors make an improbable playoff run or the Giants actually win the World Series, it doesn’t take much to get me back into die-hard mode.

Especially with the Giants since I knew everything about them for about 10 years of my life.

It’s all very easy compared to how hard I worked to become a Barça fan. I couldn’t keep in touch with how things were going by paying attention to the local news or office chitchat. I had to read game reports in Spanish and research the history of the team the best I could. I took what I learned in design classes and art history classes and became interested in Barcelona the city. I don’t claim to be a local but I’ve had to steep myself in many things Catalán.

It’s a lot of work but it’s what makes me a fan.

And it puts into perspective how easy it is to be a local. When the Giants won the World Series, I was thrilled. But I also felt like celebrating it was sort of cheating. I’m used to being either the hardcore Barça fan who follows everything because he has to, or the hardcore Giants fan I used to be when I was 16. I don’t have to be either of those now.

As a result, despite it meaning more to me when the Giants won the Series than anytime Barça has won anything, I felt that I was somehow bandwagoning onto my own team. That there were other fans who had committed more and deserved to celebrate more. And I was just a local who had sort of coasted along. Just because it’s easy to follow the team doesn’t make me less of a fan. But it should make me realize how lucky I am that it can be that easy.

Mercenaries

“You know why kids love athletes?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause they screw lingerie models?”

“No, that’s why we love athletes. Kids love athletes because they follow their dreams.”

Since I just watched Up in the Air this weekend,* this segment of dialog was still stuck in my brain when I read Jake Meador’s blog post defending soccer mercenaries today. I readily agree with the basic premise that it’s much easier to be liked as a soccer player if you are lucky enough and good enough to become a loyal player to a big club. The thought-provoking question is really about how to think of great players who weren’t lucky enough to come up through the youth ranks of a big club.

*I completely agree with everyone who calls it today’s The Apartment. It’s funny but it’s not a comedy. Not really.

The theory I’ve developed is that when it comes to athletes, all of us fans still react to them as we did when we were kids. We don’t think of athletes as employees or workers, we think of them as having followed their dreams—our dreams. The longer an athlete maintains that illusion, the more fans will relate. But if an athlete breaks that illusion, watch out. We react poorly when our dreams are shattered.

This, admittedly, is an impossible task for most athletes. At least, in the US, free agency has a certain fairness to it. When a player’s contract runs out, he can sign any deal he can get. Young stars* seeking their first big payday will tend to sign for the most money in order to make up for being underpaid in their earlier career. Older stars seeking a last shot at glory before retirement may take a pay cut to be a role player on a contending team. It always sucks to be a fan of the team which a star leaves but we all understand that if he’s not under contract, he no longer plays for us. And it’s not like this is a surprise, the contract terms were signed years ago.

*Only stars can be mercenaries. Everyday players are journeymen.

Yet despite all that, every year a star player leaves for a bigger/richer/more promising club, there’s grumbling about him selling out or taking the easy path.

In international soccer, it’s even tougher. The transfer system there means that players often have to force their way out of clubs. To the fans, this makes the players seem like the bad guys unless they appear to be forced out of their clubs. And the more the transfer appears to be about money, the more fans dislike the move. This is why the big clubs sell themselves with the myths of their history and why there is so much antipathy toward the nouveau riche among the soccer traditionalists.

The only solution for a player is to try to reëstablish the narrative. Make it not about the money or even the explicit titles. It’s about childhood dreams and recapturing a club’s past glory or wanting to make history with the current squad. And back up the talk with the walk. Be a loyal player. Realize the club is bigger than you are. While it helps to win, losing heroically is also okay.

Make us dream. We don’t want to be reminded that sports is business. We watch sports to escape from all that crap.

Gloryhunting

One of the most interesting things about being a sports fan involves the reactions from other people when I’m wearing the team colors.* For most of my life, the reactions have tended to be pretty mild. My teams haven’t been particularly successful or popular and the reactions have been the friendly recognition of a fellow fan** or the friendly joshing from a rival.***

*My usual attire does not warrant any extra attention and I typically do not stay aware of either what I’m wearing or how people around me are reacting to it.

**Either a fellow fan of the team or fellow fan of the sport.

***Most notably when Barry Bonds was still playing for the Giants.

Things have been changing, especially over the past year. I’m in the weird position now where a lot of my sports apparel is for teams which have a certain amount of bandwagon appeal.

With my Giants gear, this isn’t a problem. It’s my local team and completely expected that anyone remotely interested in the team would be celebrating a World Series win. I do kind of feel like a poser since baseball has been gradually losing relevance to me but I know I paid my dues many times over as a child.

It’s my Barcelona and Spain gear where I’m really noticing a change. Both teams are extremely in right now—to the point where I see Barça or España jerseys randomly around almost every weekend.

This is both cool and weird. When I first started wearing soccer jerseys, I was typically asked to explain what team it was and why I was wearing it. Now, no need to explain. Instead I get to deal with haters* or people enthusiastically telling how much they love the team but never mentioning anything specific. Likewise, people wearing the jerseys are no longer people who I can count on knowing the current news. They may not even know soccer.

*The more a team wins, the more people come out of the woodwork to hate it.

As a result, I find myself preferring my older jerseys to my newer ones and falling into those hipster clichés about liking things before they became cool. I normally make fun of people who try to make those kinds of claims but sports is different. Supporting a sports team is an almost irrevocable choice. Pick a team, become a fan, and you’re a fan for life. None of this flitting from team to team business. No rooting for multiple teams (unless they never compete against each other). And definitely no gloryhunting.

I know I’m stuck with Barça no matter what happens. My annoyance at the gloryhunters is partially because I don’t like them no matter who they root for, but it’s mainly because I know they will tarnish the perception of all us fans and then bail as soon as things get tough.

And the fact that every once in a while, I catch myself looking forward to when they bail…