Beautiful Details: A look at the alternative side of Sports Photography

The young boy knows what’s coming. Head down, gloved hands protecting his face, all he can do is brace his body as the older boy’s fist hurtles towards his rib cage. The bigger fighter’s expression is one of placid concentration, but in the background the crowd are having a whale of a time. “There’s so much fun there,” says Luca Sage, the photographer who took the image. “To stand there by those fights, it’s not just the passion you experience but the joy. It’s what they love. So it’s multi-faceted and I’m trying to get everything in the pictures but there are things that make you recoil because you can hear the hits and they’re only young lads.” Street Fight is an extraordinary series of photographs. They were taken in Jamestown, Ghana, a poor town next to one of the country’s biggest slums which has a remarkable record of producing professional fighters. In our image-saturated culture we are bombarded with photographs, and sports pictures are big business. The mainstream media fixates on what Jonny Weeks, sports picture editor of The Guardian, calls the “two-man-and-a-ball-action-here-it-is-straight-up-in-your-face-dynamism-action-bang” shots. But there’s a whole world of much more engaging and alternative sports photography out there. What makes an interesting sports picture? And what draws so many photographers to these subjects? For Luca, part of the attraction is the actual process involved. “Usually I shoot very slow, formal portraits and it was almost like that was only one side of my character coming out. I love sport and when I’m shooting it I don’t feel like I’m just a bystander; to move around with them, you feel very involved in it. If you can dance you can shoot boxing; if you can’t, you’re going to get hacked.” But over and above the physical thrill of this kind of work, he finds that sport is a perfect prism through which to capture human nature. “The thing about boxers is that when you’re around them they’re very calm people. You’ve got to be very controlled otherwise you’re not going to make it in boxing. So you’ve almost got the dichotomy of human nature in one. You’ve got this sense of having to train and dedicate everything to boxing and then in those moments when you’re in the ring you’ve got to unleash the tiger, unleash that dark side.” Luca studied social anthropology at university and as a photographer was originally drawn to post-conflict countries like Serbia and Northern Ireland. He admits that war both “saddens and fascinates” him, but through sport he’s found he can pursue these interests in a less harrowing context. “The boxing shifted the conflict from a community or society level onto more of a personal, individual one. Take football; we are divided because of who we support but on a level that is quite human. That hatred is fascinating to me. It shows human nature but on a very controlled stage.” Like Luca, Spencer Murphy uses a military analogy when discussing sports photography. He has shot projects featuring cross country runners, BMX riders, surfers and jockeys (one of which won this year’s Taylor Wessing prize). His approach is usually to avoid the action altogether. “Sport is often a tough, extreme and emotional environment, particularly when you get into the professional realms; people who’ve pushed themselves to the limits of their fitness. It’s almost like our modern equivalent of pulling people off the battlefield; they’ve given so much of themselves, the control has gone and that’s what I’m looking for. Something when their guard is dropped and they’re not conscious of how they are presenting themselves. “Generally I like setting up a studio in a space where I can grab them off the finish line or straight after their event. You get people who are exhausted and either elated or downtrodden and there’s something genuine about that you can’t manipulate.” Although his sporting projects have usually been portraiture, Spencer shot a series featuring parkour runners performing in his studio, his own take on a familiar photographic conundrum and one that perhaps explains the attraction of sport; how do you convey movement in a medium that is still? “It goes as far back as Eadweard Muybridge when he was taking fast cameras and multiple frames to explore that idea. It’s the dilemma you are faced with. It’s easy enough to take an image of someone doing a very show-offy move and freeze-frame it in mid-air but it’s the before and after; how you give that a sense of fluidity, which is what I was interested in with the Parkour Generations series. “It was about exploring the art of movement; trying to show traces of where they had been. There was no digital manipulation, it was all done in-camera; so it’s a combination of traces of light and flashed image to get that crisp motion.” But the parkour series was the exception rather than the rule. Usually he is interested in portraits of the participants, whether he understands the particular sport or not. During his early commissi