A new photography exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art will showcase the photographic documentation of track and field competition at the last six Olympic Summer Games.
The exhibit, “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Spirit of Track-and-Field Sports,” features a diverse array of photographs depicting track and field athletes and other subjects relating to Olympic track and field competition from prominent photojournalists. They include Annie Leibovitz, David Burnett, Kenneth Jarecke and Dilip Mehta, who are all part of Contact Press Images, the photographic agency that produced the show.
“This is an opportunity to show more than just what was selected to be in Sports Illustrated and Newsweek. It’s a broader investigation of what the photographer saw,” said Lawrence Fong, associate director and curator of American and regional art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, who invited Contact Press Images to create the show for the museum.
The show’s curator, Robert Pledge, president and editorial director of Contact Press Images, organized the show’s photos into the various disciplines of track and field, from relay to shot put. The photos are arranged in sequences showing moments of different track events from beginning to end. Each sequence is made up of photos from different photographers, at different times, and different places in black and white or color. The individual images in the sequences show such split-second moments like when the baton is passed from one relay runner to another or a runner just as he jumps forward to begin a race.
“In the Olympics, everything is about movement, and still photography is all about stillness. It’s the medium that is the most contradictory,” Pledge said. Yet, he said, photography is probably the most powerful medium to capture the games. “You can convey the mood and the ambiance that occur during these kinds of events,” he said.
Of the show’s juxtaposition of images of track and field events taken by different photographers at different places and different times, Jeffrey Smith, executive director at Contact Press Images and producer of the show, said, “You’re making comparisons in a photographic style. You’re looking to create a moment of commonality, how the sport is still very much the same.”
The show also focuses on depicting Olympic track and field events as a whole. “Most sports photographers just photograph the finish line,” Smith said. “There is so much more to the sport.”
Photojournalist David Burnett, whose photographs are featured prominently in the exhibit, agreed. In justifying turning his camera away from the athletes and onto such subjects as the Korean track and field judges during the 1988 games in Seoul, Korea, or the wall of photographers poised to take photos of a race, he said, “It’s like being on stage, but making pictures of the actors in the wings of the theater, backstage, in the dressing rooms. Sometimes those moments can give you insight into things in a way that a straightforward action shot might not.”
In fact, deciding to position himself with his cameras in a spot other than the finish line during the women’s 3000 meter final at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Track & Field Trials paid off well for Burnett. He captured U.S. runner, and expected winner, Mary Decker Slaney trip and fall after colliding with her challenger Zola Budd, shattering her dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal. The resulting image of Decker on the ground, her face contorted in pain, anger and disappointment, is the most iconic photograph in the exhibit and is shown along with the series of photos leading up to Decker’s fall.
“Very often, in fact, it is the stories beyond the winners, which are the most compelling, the most dramatic,” Burnett said.