Sporting Grace
“Most of us don’t feel comfortable on camera. So when we’re in front of one, we immediately change our posture. But he never flinched, never budged. He’s a natural.”
On a recent overcast afternoon in Century City, Walter Iooss stood next to one of the most iconic shots of his career and briefly reminisced. The subject was not a male model, but someone with the instincts of one: It’s a 1998, black-and-white portrait of Michael Jordan, who stares back at you with the type of frank intensity that only those with nothing left to prove are capable. “He’s like Elle MacPherson,” Iooss continues. “Long arms, big shoulders, long legs—they both just fall into the pose.”
The dapper Iooss (pronounced “yose”) is a star in the world of sports photography, a rigorous discipline, one ferociously competitive and snubbed by many high art devotees. Which is why The Annenberg Space for Photography’s upcoming exhibition of photographs by Iooss and fellow legendary sports photographer Neil Leifer, which opens Saturday, is refreshing, even for Angelenos who have never watched a baseball game with jaws agape at Barney’s Beanery—this writer included. In a sporting world of ego and seven-figure salaries forever spiraling upwards, the two artists manage to capture fleeting moments of honesty and beauty with startling regularity (both have practiced the craft for decades).
Michael Jordan, Chicago, IL., 1998. By Walter Iooss
You’ll instantly recognize many among the 80 photographic prints on hand in this new L.A. photo museum that’s given some much needed soul to the city’s glorified office park. There’s Leifer’s shot of Muhammad Ali staring down a prostrate Sonny Liston seconds after he knocked him to the ground in 1965; and Iooss’ early morning portrait of Tiger Woods, preparing to tee off at Windemere Golf Club in Orlando as the morning fog burns off.
But some of the most poignant selections you’ve likely never seen, unless you’ve kept stacks of Sports Illustrated from the 1970s to the present. Leifer’s work includes a nostalgic 1971 photo of former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, smiling warmly from beneath a hooded sweatshirt with a very prominent missing front right tooth. From Iooss’ lens, we see a young Michelle Kwan in an elegant starting pose, as though she’s about to skate. Except she’s standing on a sheet of black plexiglass on a midtown Manhattan roof. “It was a heavily smoggy day in New York,” Iooss says, “so I put on a warming filter, and that’s the shot we got. It’s always a nice starting point to be working with someone that graceful.”
Muhammad Ali Knocks out Sonny Liston, May 25, 1965. By Neil Leifer
Like all sports photographers, Iooss fights a continuous battle of gaining access to famous subjects. Sometimes it devolves into absurdity, like the time he was given two minutes to shoot Tiger Woods (with strobes, he was able to fire off forty frames). Athletes often show up late to a shoot and leave early; they’re not always the most accommodating of subjects, which makes Iooss’ work all the more interesting.
But some of the best shots presented are not of the über-famous. In 1999, Iooss traveled twice to Cuba for an evocative portrait series of child athletes: a startlingly steely young boxer, for example, or a petite rhythmic gymnast practicing a back bend in the middle of a Havana street with a hoop held high towards the gray sky. “There’s so much more demand on the star athletes these days,” Iooss says, “which is what makes shooting [portraits] of these kids so enjoyable—you don’t need credentials to do so.”
Sport, Iooss & Leifer opens Saturday at The Annenberg Space for Photography, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, (213) 403-3000, www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11am-6pm. General admission is free.