ANTICIPATION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SPORTS PHOTOGRAPHY IS FLAT-OUT REPORTORIAL IN MOST CASES, placing its crucial emphasis on the capture of “the decisive moment”. The play that saved the day, or, at least, earned the headline. Hail Mary passes. Impossible catches. Long, nothin’-but-net buzzer-beaters hurled hopefully from Downtown. These are the essence of sports coverage; images that freeze such moments, photos which often outlive the text that they were designed to accompany. Sports photography is, for the most part, about moments of record, moments of now.
Take it out of its pro-level context, however, and sports, as played by most of the rest of us, can simply be about someday….or more precisely, any moment now. Sports reports are often viewed as strongly edited segments that stitch together one now moment after another in breathless digests of daily “greatest hits”. For many of us regular slobs, however, life isn’t played out that way. Real time, on our playing fields, consists of an infinite number of long, eventless stretches. Sadly, most of us don’t move seamlessly from career high to career high. Instead, there are many stops along the way…to smell the roses, count down the clock, and praaaaaaay for the final bell.
Photographically, kid sports often strike me as more fun than adult games, principally because the terms of engagement are so very different from the grown-up stuff. Children’s games are free of the deadly seriousness that seems to have tainted sports in recent years, robbing them of much of their playful escape. Young Dick and Young Jane aren’t doing this for a living. There is seldom anything of consequence on the line, except maybe the vanity of their parents. And when it comes to providing great images, the mix of true technique and awkward innocence makes for a charming combination, as the young combatants ape their mentors, even as they betray their innate kid-ness.
Opportunity..? (2016)
The young man captured here is, above all else, having fun. He’s enjoying the sweet anticipation of the unexpected. He already has the mechanics of a young pro, but his curious exploration of the option of stealing third is all little boy. Lots of story here, and in many moments which never approach the drama of a national championship or a three-peat. Images are narratives, and, in photographing more than just a player’s once-in-a-lifetime Grand Slam, we learn about striving. And waiting. And dreaming.
Theirs and ours.
TAKE ME OUT TO THE “ALL” GAME
Baseball is a game about anticipation. Photos of it should show that feeling as well.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
YOU SEE RIDICULOUS ARTICLES FROM TIME TO TIME claiming that baseball has been replaced as America’s Pastime. Such spurious scribblings invariably point to game attendance, TV ratings, or some other series of metrics that prove that football, basketball, and, who knows, strip Scrabble have reduced baseball to some quaint state of irrelevancy. All such notions are mental birdpoop for one salient reason. No one is giving due attention to the word pastime.
Not “passion”. Not “madness”. Not even “loyalty”. Pastime. A way of letting the day go by at a leisurely pace. A way to gradually unfurl afternoons like comfy quilts. People-watching. Memory. Sentiment. Baseball is for watchers, not viewers, something that television consistently fails to realize. It’s the stuff that happens in the pauses, of which the game has plenty. Enjoying baseball, and photographing it as an experience, is about what happens in the cracks.
Images are waiting to be harvested in the dead spots between pitching changes. The wayward treks of the beer guys. The soft silence of anticipatory space just before the crack of a well-connected pitch. TV insists on jamming every second of screen time-baseball with replays, stat tsunamis, and analysis. Meanwhile, “live”, in the stadium, the game itself is only part of the entertainment. Sometimes, it actually drops back to a distant second.
Only a small percentage of my baseball pictures are action shots from the field: most are sideways glances at the people who bring their delight, their dreams, and their drama to the game. For me, that’s where the premium stories are. your mileage may vary. Sometimes it’s what’s about to happen that’s exciting. Sometimes it’s the games you remember while watching this one. There are a lot of human factors in the game, and only some of them happen between the guys in uniform.
Photography, as a pastime, affords a great opportunity to show a pastime. America’s first, best pastime.
It’s not just a ballgame. It’s an “all” game.
Root, root, root.
thenormaleye 