Sports photographer Neil Leifer on his legendary 60-year career

 

Via CBS News

February 24, 2021

View Neil Leifer's photography here.

NEIL LEIFER: RELENTLESS

Neil Leifer

Muhammad Ali Training, Fifth Street Gym, Miami, October, 1970

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM, in conjunction with the Briscoe Center for American History, is pleased to host a special exhibition and book signing celebrating Neil Leifer's most recent book, "Relentless”. The exhibition opens with a reception and book signing with the photographer on Friday, July 29, 5 – 7:30 PM.

Neil Leifer is the best-known sports photographer of the past half century.  Now, in Relentless, a collaborative publication of the Dolph Briscoe Center and the University of Texas Press, Leifer takes us behind the scenes of some fifty of his most iconic pictures. Starting with his shot of Baltimore Colt Alan Ameche scoring the game-winning touchdown against the New York Giants during sudden death overtime in the 1958 NFL Championship game at Yankee Stadium—taken on Leifer’s sixteenth birthday—he tells enthralling, often hilarious stories of getting to the right place at the right time to capture many of the legendary athletes of the twentieth century, including Mickey Mantle, Arthur Ashe, Willie Mays, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Namath, and Arnold Palmer, as well as shooting presidential and celebrity portraits and covering a variety of subjects for Time. Recapping both an incredibly successful career and the transformation of photojournalism since the era of the great photo magazines, Relentless effectively chronicles fifty years of American popular culture

Relentless:  400 pages with 276 black & white and color photos, $45, is available from the Gallery.

Neil Leifer's photograph are included in the exhibition: Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present at the Brooklyn Museum through January 8, 2017.

Neil Leifer: 1963 World Series Final Game - Sandy Koufax celebrating with Maury Wills, Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, CA

Sonny Liston landed on canvas below Muhammad Ali’s feet on May 25, 1965, and Neil Leifer snapped a photo

Neil Leifer: Muhammad Ali Knocks Out Sonny Liston, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965

Via Slate

The photo languished unlauded—before it was (much later) recognized as one of the greatest sports photos of all time; Ali became the most hated figure in American sports—before he was (much later) named “The Sportsman of the Century”; and Liston was subjected to intense scrutiny—before (not much later) he fizzled into a mostly forgotten footnote.

Like many sports fans, I’d glimpsed this picture for years—in random Ali articles, atop “best of” lists, even on T-shirts—but it wasn’t until doing my own research, excavating layers, that I discovered its most astounding attribute:
 

Everything you’d initially imagine about the image is wrong.
 

But first, just look at that photo! It instantly hits your eyes haloed in a corona of potency—structured so soundly as to seem staged, this forceful frieze of physical dominance. The Victor yells, the Loser displays himself vanquished, and the Watchers are all caught in that moment. The kinetic poetry of moving bodies, momentarily frozen, such is the stuff of the best sports photos—this has that.

There are also the incongruities! The Victor, appearing to proclaim dominance, is in fact pleading for the bested man to rise; and, for that matter, there is secretly a second bested rival below Ali; and though this looks like the moment after a vicious put-down punch, the photo was actually preceded by the puniest of blows, a “phantom punch,” as it would later be known—a wispy, theoretical mini-hook that none in attendance even observed. That Crowd so multitudinous that it stretches beyond the horizon line? They were actually the smallest assembled crowd in heavyweight championship history—there to witness a bumbling conclusion, filled with calls that the fix was in. This bout: still boxing’s biggest unsolved mystery. This image: still iconic, even (especially) with the controversy, for a sport as mythologized as it is crooked. Click for full article.

Joe McNally: A Life Behind the Lens

Via The Annenberg Center

Joe McNally

A Life Behind the Lens

From Thursday, January 16th, 2014

 

 

 

As a globetrotting magazine photographer, Joe McNally’s creative use of light has been the most notable aspect of his approach to shooting. Whether covering an editorial assignment for magazines such as TIME, Fortune and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, or shooting ad campaigns and corporate work for Fortune 500 companies, McNally embraces the power that light plays on a photo subject.
 

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The recipient of numerous photo awards, McNally has been a contract photographer for Sports Illustrated, a staff photographer at LIFE and is an ongoing 25-year contributor to National Geographic. He teaches his craft globally and has penned several best-selling photo books. McNally also created “Faces of Ground Zero – Giant Polaroid Collection.” The resulting exhibit and book raised approximately $2 million for relief efforts.

Watch Joe as he discusses the trials and tribulations of his career, the problems and personalities he dealt with and the overriding sense of humor that gets him through the day.

Joe McNally's photographs will be exhibited at Monroe Gallery of Photography October 3 - November 23, 2014
 

Sports photography legend Neil Leifer talks about life’s work at retrospective show

Via The Baltimore Sun

Famed photographer Neil Leifer – whose iconic photography is currently on exhibit at the  Sports Legends Museum, – will tell you without hesitation, which of his many photographs is his favorite picture taken during his illustrious career. And it’s not one you might expect.

 

Full article with slideshow here.

 

 

The 54-picture photography exhibit “Images We Remember-The World of Neil Leifer continues through October 2014 at Sports Legends Museum. The museum will host a Behind the Lens event with Leifer September 28, where he will discuss his photography career, the transition to producing directing films and answer audience questions.