SPORTS HISTORY

Athletes staged by the Nadar workshop to Clint Eastwood photographed with a football by Xavier Lambours, the connections between sportsmen and photographers take side roads in the collection of the Heritage and Photography Media Library (MPP). Sport and competition, highlighted in this year of Olympics in France, provide a unique opportunity to unearth rarely shown images. These highlight relationship of photographers working on commission or leading projects personal, whether they are writer-photographers, like Émile Zola, photojournalists, like Guy Le Querrec and Renée Falcke, illustrators, like René-Jacques, or visual artists, like Gladys. Since the invention of the medium, in In the mid-19th century, amateur and professional photographers captured the emerging sports practices, first in the upper classes of the society. At the beginning of the 20th century, a time for leisure found its place in the daily life of everyone: gymnasts, cyclists, ball players and fencers become recurring motifs in the photographs. Some celebrate the pleasure of the sporting gesture, when others exalt the search for precision leading to performance. Gradually, sport is becoming more democratic; a industry is born. The search for speed and power as proof absolute excellence takes place in dedicated places: stadiums and circuits. Resulting from a partnership between the Jeu de Paume, the MPP and the city of Reims, History of sports offers the opportunity to discover or rediscover the sports photographs held in national collections. It shows, like this album which accompanies it, a great diversity of approaches, bringing together more than two hundred prints from thirty professional photographers and amateurs, from the 1890s to the 2000s. Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition designed and organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris in collaboration with the Heritage and Photography Media Library and presented at the Cellier by the city of Reims from May 24 to August 25, 2024.