ARLES, France (CN) — Athletes are suspended in midair in a blue building that resembles a warehouse, tucked behind a highway on the outskirts of Arles. Acrobats hold Hula-Hoops inside a gilded frame, posed next to an Eiffel Tower replica. The silhouette of a photographer contrasts with runners sprinting down a red track.
This is "Sport in Focus," the Olympic photography exhibit that coincides with this year's Paris Olympics, in the Musée Départemental Arles Antique. The show highlights roughly 100 years of sports photography as part of the annual photography festival in Arles, France, a mid-sized town in Provence.
Arles has the makings of any idyllic French town: narrow, quiet streets lined with bars and restaurants, a soft breeze and flowers blooming from window boxes. It’s where Vincent Van Gogh found inspiration, and there’s an art foundation named in his honor. The annual photography festival gives the town a creative edge over other similar-sized cities that can seem overrun by tourists, and leaves lasting artistic imprints there throughout the year in the city's many galleries.
"Sport in Focus" is not just a celebration of feats of athletic prowess; the exhibit explores wider questions around sports photography.
“For me, it was interesting to think about how women athletes are photographed. I found it quite striking to see that there are guidelines today that are given to photographers who are asked to pay attention to the way women are represented,” Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée and curator of the exhibition, told Courthouse News.
“We give them guidelines to avoid reinforcing stereotypes, and to make sure to treat men and women athletes in the same way in images,” she said.
This includes telling photographers to avoid taking “sexy” pictures of female athletes, Herschdorfer explained.
The exhibit explores how photography and sports have evolved in tandem since the 1896 Olympic Games, drawing on collections from the Olympic Museum and the Photo Elysée museum in Lausanne. The political aspect of the games is also on display, showcasing the inherent nature of the games as an opportunity for political spectacle.
“It was cool to see the sports in action,” one man, who preferred not to be named, told Courthouse News as he was leaving the exhibition. “There was a lot of propaganda both for liberal democracies and dictatorships.”
There are official Olympic posters with host-country motifs, magazines and ID cards of former photographers scattered throughout.
In a poster advertising the 1972 Munich games, wrestlers in blue caught in the middle of a throw contrast with a blood orange background.
Luc Leman travels to the photography festival every year, since his daughter lives in Arles. He was blown away by the display.
“It wasn’t only about sports, we see a lot of things around the sports,” he told Courthouse News. “It was very impressive; we aren’t used to seeing these photographs.”
Black-and-white photos line the walls. Athletes sprint down tracks, swimmers dive backwards into pools and divers are caught mid-air. René Burri, a Swiss photographer, captured a man shooting off a pistol in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In another photo, the 1896 Athens Olympic arena overflows with spectators in top hats.
In one black-and-white photo, a woman doing a backbend lifts her leg, which seems to spiral into a flower of the other acrobats' legs behind her.
For Herschdorfer, though, one of the most striking elements of Olympic photography isn’t the athletes at all — it’s about the crowds.
“Sports photography is also very interested in the public, and the public is this mass of anonymous people who express very strong emotions,” she said. “We see faces of people who are in stupor or in silence with their mouths open, or on the contrary, in states of joy, total happiness, the real intoxication of a moment.”
The public adds another dimension to sports photography, she said.
“We also want to participate in the crowd and live in the moment with people, because we don't watch sports alone; we are always surrounded,” Herschdorfer said. “So that is a strong element of a sporting event.”
On Friday, roughly 300,000 spectators will line the banks of the Seine for the opening ceremony of the Paris games.
The exhibit runs through Sept. 29.
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