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TheJoyofVictory,theAgonyofDefeat:
StereotypesinNewspaperSportsFeature
Photographs
Every day, working newspaper photographers have the
following problem to solve: how, in a very limited
amount of time, to make photographs which illustrate
newspaper stories, and will be accepted by editors
whose criteria is that readers be able to read and
understand the photograph quickly, and that the
photograph have sufficient impact to catch the
readers eye and entice them to read the text.
Newspaper photographers solve this problem by
making highly conventionalized images, using a
limited number of visual components and
compositional devices to illustrate a limited number of
ideas or stories. These photographs offer ready-made
solutions to the problem: editors accept them, readers
know how to read them, subjects know how to pose for
them. The photographs that appear in newspapers are,
overall and in their details, a result of this
conventionalization.
Because of the peculiar character of sports reporting in
daily newspapers, sports feature photographs are a
particularly good place to study the
conventionalization of news imagery. Sports is one
area of news which, by tradition, is allowed to be
openly partisan and non-objective. The local paper,
primarily interested in the fortunes and fate of the
local teams and their players, wants the management,
manager and players of the home team to win games
and championships. It rejoices in wins, suffers for
losses, praises exemplary behavior, and chastises bad
actors (as New York papers criticized and denounced
George Steinbrenner for years).[1]

Other areas of the paper are, also by tradition and

convention, objective, reporting the news and the
facts and avoiding editorializing in the news
columns. As many analyses (Molotch and Lester 1974,
Tuchman 1978, Gans 1980) have shown, however, they
are not objective in that way (in fact, there is a good
argument that such neutrality is impossible). Because
the partisanship in sports is explicit, not a cause for
shame or apology, we can see the devices of visual
partisanship most clearly there and should be able to
use them as clues for the general analysis of
partisanship in news photography.
Sports is a good area to study the processes of
conventionalization, too, because newspapers carry
only a few, highly simplified stories about sports. With
the photographs that illustrate them, they present a
pared-down, highly selective view of the actual world
of sports, stories about a make-believe world in which
certain aspects of our society are emphasized and
made the basis for the entire description of a world.
We can call this world Sportsland. In this simplified
world, only a few important things go on, there are
only a few issues, only a few commonly held values.
If the sports section of the daily newspaper gives a
complete and accurate report of events in a world
parallel to ours (as in the science fiction stories of
parallel worlds), then we can discover the
characteristics of that world from this accurate and
complete report. This is the opposite tack to thinking
of reporting on sports as incomplete and partial
(which, of course, we know to be the case), and taking
it allows us to see what sort of world the sports page
promotes.
The photographs I used to define Sportsland are
entries from the sports feature category of the 46th
Annual Pictures of the Year (POY) Contest, judged in
March of 1989 at the University of Missouri School of
Journalism. Newspaper photographers take the
contest very seriously. Winning can help them get a
better job or a raise, and the most well-known
professionals enter. Each year, over 2000
photographers, working for newspapers of every size,

kind of ownership, and geographical area, and for

magazines, as well as unaffiliated (freelance)
photographers, enter. Photographers select their own
entries, choosing the pictures theyve made during the
past calendar year that they think best embody
professional standards of excellence. The pictures need
not have been published to be entered, although most
have. The categories for single newspaper photographs
include: spot news, general news, feature, sports
action, sports feature, pictorial, and
portrait/personality. The categories for groups of
pictures include news picture story, feature picture
story, newspaper portfolio of the year, and magazine
portfolio of the year.
The entries constitute an excellent sample for a study
of the conventionalization process, one that would be
difficult to gather in any other way but that avoids
obvious sources of sampling bias. Photographers
submit pictures which they think and hope embody the
professional values the judges will use in arriving at a
decision so, even if the photographs are not
representative of the universe of pictures actually made
or published, they represent the system of ideas
participants in the system aspire to. Photographers no
doubt submit their best, not their run of the mill,
pictures. But that imperfection in the sample works
against the hypothesis I will present, and therefore is
not a flaw. That is, photographers submit pictures they
think have something special about them, because of
which they will stand out from the run of the mill. If
even pictures selected to be different are very similar,
as they are, the interpretation offered here will be even
more strongly confirmed.
Newspaper Sports Feature is one of the categories for
individual images. 1521 photographs made during the
calendar year 1988 were entered in this category. The
contest entry brochure describes a sports feature
photograph as a sports related feature photograph,
and a feature photograph as one with human interest,
a fresh view of the commonplace. This differs from
the Newspaper Sports Action category, a peak action
photograph that captures the competitive spirit.

The six judges are professionals, working

photographers and editors chosen by the
administrators of the contest. Paid only expenses, they
still spend as much as two weeks in the judging
process, looking at thousands of projected slides. They
vote electronically, each judge pushing a red button to
reject the slide, green to keep it in the running, on
slides projected for only a few seconds, and make their
decisions rapidly. Judges can request caption
information, but usually dont until the final round,
when the hundreds of entries in a category have been
narrowed to ten or so finalists.
What are the characteristics of the worldcall it
Sportslandthe photographs describe?
The main activities are Big Time Sports, highly
organized and publicized games and eventsusually
professional or quasi-professional college sportsin
which winning is a major news item. Who wins the Big
Games is important for everyone.
Sportsland is divided into two categories: winners and
losers. If you arent a winner, youre a loser. Its Vince
Lombardi Land: winning is not the main thing, its the
only thing.
Sportsland is also divided into Us and Them: the home
team and the visitors. When the world is going right,
the home team wins. (The home team can be literally
the team from the town the paper is in, or it can be by
extension, as in the Olympics, where the U.S. is the
home team.)
The people who inhabit SportsLand are the
participants in Big Time Sports, the players and
athletes. They are in the prime of adult life: young to
youngish-middle age; in top physical condition;
morally superior in character; hard working and highly
skilled; under intense pressure to do their best and to
win.
These are the chief characteristics of Sportsland. Ill
describe others in connection with the major
categories of the analysis below.

ConventionalizedImagery
The basic elements of the analysis are stories, gestures,
and compositional devices.
Stories are the basic plots the photographs illustrate.
What kinds of things can happen in the world being
pictured? Which one of them has happened here? In a
competitive sporting event, the basic stories are
winning or losing. One team or person wins, the other
loses, as in baseball, basketball, or tennis, or one from
a field of competitors wins while the others lose, as in
gymnastics or bicycle racing.
Newspaper photographers talk about making pictures
that capture the story telling moment. Capture
implies that the photograph already exists objectively.
Not constructed, it is, literally, out there for the taking.
Not so with the story. Stories depend on context. If, as
a photographer, you are covering a game in which your
citys team is playing at home, the story is what
happened to your team. Did they win or lose? If your
team won, the story telling picture tells the story of
their win. But the same game will be covered by out-of
town photographers, for whom the story of the same
event is that their team lost. Their story telling
picture tells the story of defeat and dejection. Wire
service photographers often function as the out-oftown photographer. So, at a basketball game,
photographers from the local papers plant themselves
under the local teams basket, but the wire service
photographer sits at the other end of the court to
photograph the visiting team scoring. (This does not
occur when a game (e.g., a playoff) has national
importance.)
Some sports provide potential negative instances. In
golf or tennis, for instance, there are no home teams.
The same process occurs, however, with favorites
replacing home teams.
Gesturesthe movements and postures of the people
photographedare the elementary visual components
out of which the pictures are made. Some common
gestures in sports photographs involve the position of

the head (up or down) and arms, and of the body in

relation to the ground (jumping or kneeling), as well as
ways of two people relating to each other (hugging or
confrontation).
Compositionaldevices are ways of organizing visual
components in the frame so that certain ideas are
communicated. The most common compositional
device is standard for all catagories of newspaper
photographs: one main subject, centered and
occupying most of the frame, with the background
blurred, through manipulation of the depth of the
photographic field, to avoid distracting attention from
the subject, thereby creating a shallow pictorial space
(this composition is often used in pictures of winners).
A photograph composed this way is thought to have
maximum impact. A different compositional type uses
deep space to provide a sense of isolation, achieved by
placing the main figure at the far end of a bench that
slants back diagonally, a device frequently used in
photographs of losers.
The photographs in Figures 1, 2 and 3 exemplify the
most common story: winning. 371 of the 1521 photo
entries in the sports features category (24.4%) were
winners, often so labeled by the photographers,
stereotypically as The Joy of Victory. Titles are useful
for the analysis, because they tell you the point of the
picture as the photographer intended it. Since the
photographers write the titles, they are good clues to
what the picture was intended to mean: pain, the
joy of victory, the agony of defeat, walking
wounded, exhaustion, ouch, out cold, flat out.
(Table 1 (articles_joy_tables.html) gives the
frequencies for the major categories of the analysis.)

Figure1

Figure2

Figure3

The standard set of gestures used to convey the story of

winning include: arms and head up, mouth open,
hugging, jumping, and running. The gestures are

combined in a variety of ways, but the direction of

movement is always up. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980,
1417, analyze the metaphoric meanings of up and
down). The standard composition for photographs of
winners is the one referred to above: the subject
centered in the frame, filling most of it, and a blurred
background. Table 2 (articles_joy_tables.html) gives
the frequencies for gestures and compositions within
categories (Panel A, for instance, is for winners). Every
picture categorized as a winner contains one or more of
the above mentioned gestures signifying winners.
Mixed, the largest subcategory, consists of pictures
that have several. The other subcategories, designated
by single dominant gestures, usually contain others in
a subordinate role.
Losers (see the photographs in Figures 4, 5 and 6) feel
intense agony. 192 of the 1521 sports feature
photographs (12.6%), stereotypically titled The Agony
of Defeat, pictured losing. The gestures illustrating
losing point down: head down, body slumped and
often actually on the ground. Some gestureshugging,
for exampleappear in pictures of both winning and
losing; the gestures meaning is determined by how it
is combined with other gestures.

Figure4

Figure5

Figure6

Many photographs of losers are composed like those of

winners: a dominant, centered subject with a blurred
background. In a frequent variation, however, a wider
angle of view is used: the subject is placed, alone, at
one end or corner of the frame rather than centered in
the middle. A strong diagonal, such as a bench or long
hallway, or even a receding line of teammates, extends
to the subject from the opposite end of the frame. The
combination creates a sense of deep, lonely space
surrounding the dejected loser. (see Figures 4 and 7
and Table 2 (articles_joy_tables.html), Panel B) These
photographs are often made with wide-angle lenses
(35mm and wider) which have the optical
characteristic of making objects from foreground to
background appear to be farther apart, and of greater
relative size (e.g. foreground objects appear larger
relative to background objects) than they appear to the
human eye.[2]

Figure7

Winners are often photographed in groups, celebrating

the joy of victory, but the agony of defeat is usually
pictured alone; occasionally one other person consoles
the loser. Photographers and editors consider
photographs that include winners and losers in the
same frame (Figure 8) as especially good.

Figure8

Sportsland is a dangerous place and athletes, giving

their all for the team and for victory, can come to grief
through injury. An injured player may be an object of
pity at the moment of the injury, but will eventually be
banished from Sportland as incapable of playing the
part. The ultimate injury, one which ends a career
through death or permanent disability, is a story about
the ultimate loss.
Another conventional story, rooted in this view,
describes athletes as embodying the admirable
character traits such a life requires (111 entries, 7.3%,
Table 2 (articles_joy_tables.html), Panel E). They are
fearless and brave, willing to undergo extreme physical

trials; their endurance in the face of, and acceptance of

the character-building aspects of, punishment and
torture display their willingness to sacrifice for the
team, or for the sport itself. Photographs of an injured
player, just hurt and lying bravely on the ground (Oh,
the pain of it! and The agony), illustrate
determination, and the amount of pain, injury and
defeat players must suffer as heros (Figure 9). Other
people are compassionate; they send for help and,
while its coming, are helpful and consoling: There
when you need them. Another conventionalization of
the theme of pain and determination centers on water:
tightly framed pictures of overheated and exhausted
athletes pouring water on their heads and squirting
water into their mouths (Figure 10). Physical discipline
and sufferinggoing the last mileare equated with
strength of character. In fact, winning and losing are
themselves equated with character: losers dont hustle,
dont give their best.

Figure9


Figure10

Still another story (30 entries) emphasizes the

admirable character of athletes by idealizing the team
and the group character of the sports effort. The
players cooperate in an ideal fashion to win. Their
moral superiority consists in part in being selfless and
putting the good of the team ahead of their own
personal good. (This part of the story of Sportsland has
come under a good deal of pressure as the big money
aspects of the world have increased in importance.)
When We win it is, exactly, a team win. We see players
building a pyramid of hands as an illustration of
solidarity and the sacrifice of individual glory for the
good of the team (Figure 11). These pictures are a
source of common metaphors which permeate
business and other organizations, stories about
sacrificing for the good of the team, and the moral
value of being a team player.

Figure11

In non-team sports, an idealized apotheosis of the

sport takes the place of the team. When someone
breaks a record in track (e.g., the four minute mile), it
is a victory for the entire sport, in its collective battle
against nature.
The rest of the world appears in Sportsland in
supporting roles. The chief supporting role is that of
fan, the people who buy the tickets and attend sporting
events. Fans admire and look up to athletes. Their
recognition of athletes special virtues is one of the
rewards of winning. A special case of the fan is the
reporter (in such guises as television announcer and
even as photographer) who also admires and looks up
to the athlete. 117 entries (7.7%, Table 2
(articles_joy_tables.html), Panel C) illustrated these
stories. Fans root for the team, and are jubilant or
dejected, like the players, when it wins or loses. News
photographers find the clowning and gimmicks fans
engage in to show support of their team or make fun of
the opposing team worth making pictures of. A favorite
fan antic is to wear something incongruous on your
head: a mask of a favorite player, a watermelon carved
like a football helmet, paper bags. Typical photographs
in this type show two or more fans, for instance,
wearing pumpkins on their heads, tightly framed with
an out-of-focus background (Figure 12).

Figure12

Fans also strive for some connection with the players,

and many pictures, with titles like We Won, show
them venerating their idols. The photographers
problem hereto make a composition that shows fan
support and adulationis solved by making a
photograph in which eager fans surround the athlete. A
common compositional device has the athletes

centered in the frame, surrounded by fans whose

outstretched arms proffer autograph books or
baseballs (Figure 13). A variation of this composition,
in which the media embody the admiration of the
athlete, shows the star surrounded by a circle of
microphones (Figure 14).

Figure13

Figure14

Officials (97 entries or 6.4%, Table 2

(articles_joy_tables.html), Panel D) appear in sports
feature photographs as either provoking or,
alternatively, managing the passionate emotions
attached to winning or losing. They provoke these
emotions by making close calls; when they call one
against Us, our team and our coach attack the official.
When emotions rise between players and teams, the
officials step in to keep the peace, something like police
(Figure 15). Officials are not personalities in their own
right like coaches or athletes. They stand for rules and

structure. Some photographs in the

confrontation/complaining sub-category use the
compositional device of an out of focus official in the
foreground (a blurred, impersonal symbol recognizable
by the striped jersey, for example) and a sharply
focused complaining athlete or coach in the
background (Figure 16).

Figure15

Figure16

Coaches (27 entries, Table 2

(articles_joy_tables.html), Panel F) are almost always
recognizeable because they often wear suits and ties,
and/or because they are often of an inappropriate size
(too small) or age (too old). They assist the team in its
efforts to winsometimes, like a father (the majority of
coaches in Sportsland are male), comforting, cajoling,
inspiring, chastisingand represent it in relations with
officials (protesting unfair calls), the media, and the
public.
Many sports feature pictures (260 entries, 17.1%, Table
2 (articles_joy_tables.html), Panel G) intend to be
humorous. Though humor is not itself a story,
certain conventional funny pictures are part of the
photographic repertoire. Standard funny pictures

include people with contorted faces, grimacing,

sticking their tongues out; footballs and basketballs
that appear to be someones head; people in awkward
or unusual postures, e.g., people photographed in
midair, upside down or seeming to fly. Rear ends are
sure-fire laughs (except, of course, when they belong to
women in bathing suits).
People who do not fit the criteria of age and health
cannot be serious players in Sportsland. An elderly
person cannot be a serious competitor; real athletes
are younger, capable of real sports efforts and
victories (Figure 17). Young children cannot be serious
players. This is why photographs of children engaging
in the same gestures and activities as full-fledged
participants (e.g., hanging your head in despair after
losing, or signing autographs, as in Figure 18) can only
be ironic or comic.

Figure17

Figure18

In Fathers and Sons, a sentimental version of such

photographs (24 entries, Table 1
(articles_joy_tables.html)), little boys emulate the big
boys, real athletes: the little ice hockey player, all
suited up and holding his stick, photographed from the
sidelines as he watches the real athletes play (Maybe
One Day, Figure 19). The cuteness of these
photographs embodies assumptions about the values
of sport, how children learn from adults, how good it is
for them to follow in these particular footsteps. (When
children are shown watching adults do something
bad, like drink or shoot drugs, the picture is thought
to convey a strong social message.) The name of this
category is not literal, but generic of a type: 18 of the
photographs show a male athlete with a small boy and
have titles like Daddys Boy, Walking with Dad, and
Like Father, Like Son. Two of the photographs in this
category show females. In one a female runner hugs a
little girl, and in the other a male runner kisses a little
girl.

Figure19

These photographs draw attention to the difference .

They work because viewers know the stereotype. In
fact, photographers make and select the photograph on
the assumption that viewers know the stereotype,
know what a real athlete is. The photograph, far from
questioning the stereotype, reinforces it. An image of
women doing things more appropriate for a man
(and vice versa: a big football player learning modern
dance as in Figure 20) can be used humorously,
though this isnt always true: women body builders
may look incongruous but it doesnt seem funny.

Figure20

A similar device, not intended as humorous, appears in

the 17 entries of physically or mentally disabled
athletes. The point of these pictures is that, even
though these people have a disability, theyre doing
sports. The titles are revealing: a tightly framed
photograph of a man with one leg holding a golf club is
titled simply One Legged Golfer. A small man
standing alone on the ice, holding hockey sticks and a
face mask, is titled Dwarf Manager (Figure 21). Other
photographs of disabled athletes would normally be
seen as action photographs (pictures of athletes while
theyre actually participating in the sport: running the
race, throwing the pass, lifting the weight) (Figure 22).
What makes these features is that the disabled
athletes are defined primarily by their disability, their
playing is incidental to their disability. Like the
humorous pictures of children, their difference from
the stereotype makes the photographer see the image
as a feature picture. Its the right activity, but the
wrong person: this is not real sports action and these
are not real athletes. Their ability to play at all becomes
the story; it doesnt matter who wins or loses. Its like
Samuel Johnsons remark about a report of a woman
preaching: Sir, a womans preaching is like a dog
walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you
are surprised to find it done at all. (Boswell 1980. See
also Hughes 1971.)

Figure21

Figure22

I classified 55 photographs (3.6%) as other. Some of

these images illustrate topics that appeared only once
or twice and did not fit neatly into the major categories
just discussed (for example, figures 23 and 25, which
are discussed below, were placed in this category).
Some others were not classifiable because it was not
clear, without the context of the written story they
illustrated, what they were about. Not every
photographer has succeeded in making a photograph
that reads, either on first glance or on more detailed
inspection, as being about anything in particular. No
one prevents the entry of these unsuccessful
photographs in the contest, and it should not be
necessary to be able to classify them all. (Not being a
successful newspaper photograph does not mean the

photograph is bad. One, discussed below, is an

excellent photograph, from the point of view of social
investigation.)
Two kinds of pictures entered in sports features do not
fit into any of the categories so far mentioned and are
irrelevant to this analysis. These pictures belong to the
newspaper genres pictorial and portrait rather than
sports and use the conventions of these other genres. I
discuss them to make clear what they are.
I classified 136 entries (9%) as pictorial. These
pictures are often described as beautiful or
interesting. They rely for their interest on such
graphic elements as color, blurs, shadows, pattern, and
unusual angles. Characteristically, they either have no
discernible story, or the story is almost completely
subordinated to graphic devices and to mood. Such
pictures may appear anywhere in the paper, not just
the sports section, and their makers simply take
advantage of a sports setting to find the appropriate
patterns. They are for the most part as
conventionalized as the pictures I have been
considering, but the conventions are those of the
pictorial image, not those of the sports story. Similarly,
the 53 photographs (3.5%) I classified as portraits
rely on the conventionalized forms available for
newspaper portraits, and are sports features because
the people in them are sports celebrities. Both
Pictorial and Portrait/Personality are, in fact, other
categories in the POY contest. Pictorial is defined in
the contest rules as a beautiful, graphic image:
composition, tonal and color qualities are more
important than subject matter. A Portrait/Personality
is a picture of a person that reveals the essence of the
subjects character.
If you take winning, losing, character and team as
being versions of the same overall story of competition,
and officials and coaches as subsidiary players in that
drama, then 828 of the 1521, or 54%, deal with this
stereotypical story in the canonical forms Ive
discussed. If we remove pictorial photographs and
portraits from the denominator of the fraction, the
proportion rises to 62%.

The important conclusion is that the these sports

feature pictures are overwhelmingly alike, similar in
the story being illustrated, the gestures chosen to
illustrate the story, and the compositions used to
organize them in the frame.
Similar images: the conditions of news photographic
work
What is the significance of so many similar images?
Photographers have countless choices. Each image
could have been made in many different ways. What is
at work to produce such simple, repetitive statements?
Given the organization, contraints and conditions of
newspaper work, there are good reasons for these
photographs to look the way they do. Sports feature
photographs, like all newspaper photographs, are
made in an organization that includes editors,
photographers, readers, and subjects (in this case,
athletes). This organization constrains the way
photographers work. Editors give them three or four
assignments a day covering many different subjects, so
that they have very little time to complete an
assignment. Typically, they do not have beats, and thus
cannot build up an intimate knowledge of any area of
activity. As a result, the story is defined for them by the
writer who originated the story and filled out a photo
request, and by the editor who makes the assigment.
Stories are conceptualized and known before the
photographer goes to make the photograph. In a
standard text for photojournalism students, Angus
McDougall, describing the proper way for an editor to
make an assignment, simply assumes the prior
conceptualization of the story: Writers and editors
requesting photographs should provide necessary
background information by attaching story printouts,
notes or ideas, realizing that while they are intimate
with the story, this will be the photographers first
exposure to it (McDougall, 1990, 295). One heading to
be filled out by the person requesting the photograph
is Story Idea: it should tell photographers what the
story is about, not how to shoot the photograph. Of
course, suggestions are always welcome. Editors know

what the story is and photographers, before they leave

the office, know too. Their photograph must illustrate
that story.
Photographers from different local papers or the wire
services are often covering the same story and
therefore competing with each other. Every
experienced person (which is to say every wellsocialized professional) knows what the photo to get is
in each situation. Learning to discern what the
picture is is the equivalent of developing a news
sense, knowing what the story is for an event, what
goes in the lead paragraph (Rosenblum, 1978). For
example, say the feature picture of this particular
game is of the victorious coach being carried by the
team. But which photographer gets the best picture of
the coach being carried? That depends on which
picture shows the faces of the coach and players most
visible and in sharpest focus, and which picture has the
most dramatic facial expressions. If one picture has
something distracting in the background, or an
awkward composition, then it is given a lower grade.
When editors and colleagues compare photographs of
the same event, as they usually can when rival papers
print their stories, they criticize photographers who
havent gotten the best picture, the one that best
illustrates the preconceptualized story. An editor might
say, stereotypically, This picture doesnt say losing to
me. Do you have one that says losing? Those who
dont come back with the picture that says what it
should, when other photographers do, get a reputation
of being inconsistent, undependable, or having
poor news judgment. Editors will be reluctant to
send them on important assignments. Photographers
who do get the same picture learn that they have good
news judgment.
The three pictures of Olympic runner Florence Joiner
in Figure 23 were made by three different
photographers. All three photographers knew what
the picture of this particular event was. They not only
made startlingly similar photographs (the photographs

vary mainly by which photographer was to the left of

the others), but chose their photograph as a good
example of a years work and entered it in POY.

Figure23

Working under such constraints, newspaper

photographers do not use the camera to investigate
events, but instead make photographs from a
repertoire of already known images that illustrate
already known stories. They compete to make the best
version of one of these already known ideal
photographs, what we can call canonical photographs.
Within the requirements of the whole newsgathering
system, this is a very efficient way of working. They do
not, on the other hand, try to find out something new,
nor to test a theory or idea, perhaps modifying it, or
describing it visually. Instead, they look for a new way
to say the same thing. Photography is not used to
investigate and find out about the issue, but rather to
communicate a reductive summary of it quickly.
GettingthePicture
The chief skill of the photographer becomes getting the
right picture, the one the editor will recognize as
satisfying the requirements of impact and readability,
under such circumstances. Making the images
assigned by editors may be routinized, but it isnt easy.
It requires anticipating when and where the
combination of elements necessary for theright
picture is likely to happen and maneuvering yourself
into a position to get a good photograph of it when it
does happen. Once a photographer learns these skills
they come to feel right physically: standing in the

right place to make the standard picture feels

comfortable, standing anywhere else feels awkward
and wrong.
What, specifically, do photographers do to get the
picture? Specifically, how do you make the generic
picture of the isolated, dejected loser? How, given that
people are seldom actually alone, even in moments of
defeat, do you make an image in which it appears that
they are?
First, you remember that image as a picture in your
repertoire, one that you know is a good one for
telling the story of defeat. When its apparent that your
team is losing, for instance, you look for people sitting
away from others with their heads down, or for people
coming to console someone sitting in that posture.
Once you see the potential, you sense that the generic
picture may happen. An important skill is being able to
sense when people will move away for a moment,
leaving your subject momentarily in the generic
isolated position. You keep looking for a clean
background, one whose components wont interfere
with the sense of isolation, If you cant find it where
you are standing, you move until the background has
nothing distracting in it. If there are a lot of people
behind the athlete, for instance, and none behind you,
you run to the other side to get the background with no
one in it.
You can frame so tightlythe player on the ground
filling the framethat no one else is visible though, in
fact, the player is surrounded by people. The picture is
made so that the players emotion is all it signifies,
giving a straightforward, uncomplicated meaning to
the picture. The photograph becomes an ideogram for
dejection or loss. Or you can use a long focal length
lens which, when adjusted for a short depth of field or
used at a fairly close distance, will isolate a subject,
making any background an out-of-focus blur. An editor
will say, of any of these pictures, This says losing.
Similarly, experienced sports photographers know
that, when your team is losing, you can always shoot
the team on the bench, looking up to see the instant

replay on the screen above the scoreboard. Because

you already know what happened, you know how they
will respond, and can therefore position yourself to get
them expressing frustration or disappointment.
Sidelines are always a good place to make a feature
picture, because you know that is where people will be
responding to players leaving the field, and you can get
a good reaction picture.
In other words, you have a stock of already composed
pictures in your head, which you know will illustrate
the story youve decided the game tells. When the
story changes, as it often does in sports, you change the
nature of your photographing. You might spend the
first half of a football game your team is losing, making
good pictures of defeat and dejection. But then, in
the second half, the team comes alive and finally wins,
and you go ahead and get good stuff on that. You dont
even bother to look at the film from the first half,
because you know it will be useless. (You might look at
it for POY, though, because the immediate occasion of
the jubilation or dejection will have become
irrelevant.)
To know what the story may be, you must know the
relevant things that can happen. If a player has had a
good day, fans will wait as the player heads for the
locker room, leaning over the railing with autograph
books. So a generic fan picture can be made there any
time the photographer needs it. It belongs in the
experienced practitioners catalogue of pictures you
can count on, pictures that can always be made when
the appropriate situation occurs.
There are further complications. Every play in a game
baseball is a good example is the intersection of
many stories, and thus can generate many such
canonical photographs. The story of, for instance, this
pitchers earned run average: if the next batter gets a
hit, what does that do to his statistics? And what does
that mean for his career as that unfolds from play to
play and game to game and season to season? And
what does it do to the batters statistics? The same
relevancies arise, of course, for all the other players on
both teams.

SomeAnomalies
Remember that the contest rules define a feature
picture as one that offers a fresh view of the
commonplace. In practice, the fresh view means
making a better version of a standard picture, and the
taken-for-granted normal world, Sportsland,
constitutes the commonplace. Slight deviations from
what everyone knows are what are worthy of a
photograph.
Every year good versions of these standard types of
picturespictures in which the standard compositions
are competently executedare entered in the POY
contest. But to win, as inspection of the winners from
successive years shows, the photograph must have a
twist, a second element that produces a clever or
unexpected variation on a standard type.
For example, a conventional type shows animals or
birds on a playing field: geese on the golf course during
a tournament, a gopher on the baseball field during a
game. One award winner shows a goose at a race track,
squawking at a trainer passing by on horseback; the
twist is that the trainer is squawking back (Figure
24). A human response to an animals trespass was
enough of a twist, a fresh angle, on a standard
sports feature picture to get an award.

Figure24

Similarly, none of the standard fan pictures described

earlierfans with pumpkins or watermelons carved to
look like helmets on their heads, or fans wearing masks
of favorite athletes or other celebritiesentered in the
46th annual POY won an award, but the following year,
a winning photograph shows teammates and fans of

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar facing the camera, holding

cardboard masks of Abdul-Jabbar in front of their
faces. The twist is that Abdul-Jabbar himself is
standing in the foreground, his back to the camera.
A number of pictures in the sample seem not to fit.
Some will fit, with a little forcing: the national anthem
pictures, for instance, can be seen as emphasizing the
moral character of the athletes. But, in the end, there
will be some pictures that just dont fit the analysis.
This is no great matter, because there is no reason to
have to explain every picture as being part of the great
picture of the absolute conventionalization and
stereotyping of the journalistic photograph. These are,
after all, pictures the photographers thought would
win, and some of them will be examples of
misjudgment on their part. Some of them, for instance,
just dont make it: whatever they were supposed to be
about isnt clear, yet they arent complex.
An occasional image is complex, too complex to be a
good sports page picture, yet maybe good enough to
be thought about the way we think about art
photographs. There are very few in this sample like
that. One example of a photograph that departs in style
and theme from the bulk of the sports features entries
is Figure 25. This photograph does not have a
dominant center of interest isolated from the
surroundings, rather, a number of things go on
simultaneously in the frame. Information about the
neighborhood in which the activity is happening and
the possible social class of the players is part of the
picture. The activity is not obviously part of an
organized, contest sport, and there are no facial or
bodily expressions signifying strong emotion. This
combination increases the time it takes to read the
photograph (theres more going on to look at and make
sense of) and decreases the drama. In a system that
values the photograph thats a good, quick read and
has strong impact, its no surprise that there arent
many photographs like this in the sample. The
newspaper system itself discourages making
alternatives to the standard pictures. In a similar way,
the POY judging process discourages photographers
from entering alternatives: they dont win. The

standard procedure of viewing hundreds of slides

projected only a few seconds apart means that
photographs that take longer to read stand little
chance of winning.

Figure25

Conclusion
Newspaper sports feature photographs are highly
conventionalized and stereotyped images made by
photographers using a limited visual vocabulary to tell
a limited number of stories. These methods result in
photographs that look the same even though different
photographers, photographing different sports,
working for different news organizations in different
regions of the country, have produced them.
These photographs are preconceptualized, that is, they
embody ideas about the nature of sports developed
prior to experience in the situation being
photographed. The limited visual vocabulary used
severely constrains the the kinds of ideas and
relationships the photographs can communicate. The
requirement to shoot tight for impact and
readibility, for example, creates an emphasis on a
single emotion or idea. Stepping back to include more
in the frame would make it possible to establish more
complex relationships and ideas within the image. The
virtuosity of newspaper photographers consists in their
ability to make a better version of a photograph from
the standard reportoire of already known images. In so
doing, they forego the use of photography as a visual
medium to explore and find out about the social world
(Ivins 1953).

Newspaper photographers make photographs well

suited to the requirements of the cooperative network
of people who produce the newspaper, the work
organization in which they are embedded. If they dont
do their part as they are supposed to, the flow of work
is interrrupted and the system ceases to function
efficiently (Becker, 1982). I have talked mostly about
photographers, but the newspaper system also
includes the people who pose for the photographs and
the people who read the newspaper. For readers who
are sports fans, the stereotyped image of the local team
winning may be meaningful in the way a picture of
your own wedding is not just another wedding
photograph or the childs picture you carry in your
wallet is not just another school portrait. Athletes,
similarly, may be influenced by the way they see other
athletes behave in newspaper photographs, and so
behave in similar ways. I have not studied these
phenomena, but they would repay careful
investigation.
Sports features is only one kind of newspaper
photograph, although its extreme stereotyping makes
it an ideal category in which to see the relation
between a work organization and the characteristic
images produced in and for it. But the same
organizational constraintstoo little time and, instead
of photography beats, assignments originated by
writers and editors, and the way photographs are
expected to function in the newspaper (eyecatching
and immediately understood), exist in every category
of newspaper photograph. This analysis of newspaper
sports feature photographs therefore probably also
applies to such other categories as spot news, general
news, and feature photographs. The stories told in
such photographs and the visual vocabulary used to
tell them need to be defined, and the values embodied
in these other images need to be scrutinized.
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