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CHAPTER 4 Partial Knowledge Photographic Mystifications and Constructions of “The African Athlete” JOHN BALE This chapter deconstructs a single photograph that has been disseminated during the past century in a range of publications, many of which have been related to the world of sports. My objective is to reveal the instability of visual images and the considerable slippage in the ways in which a photograph may be used and read during its existence. Additionally, it is often felt that the photograph provides the world of sport with a degree of realism that is missing from the words on a page. One of the aims of this chapter is to deny the realist argument. Indeed, it is widely recognized today that there is no one meaning in a photograph. Photography has been, and still is, a central agent in the representation of sports and sports participants. Photography features prominently in sports magazines, technical handbooks on sports training, and (auto)biographies of sports people. Works on sports history sometimes include photographs although usually they are dependent on the written text. From an academic perspective, the photograph has acted as a historical record from which content analysis may unearth useful information about historical aspects of sport. Classic photographs help to memorialize specific sporting acts. Photography has also served the technical function of determining winners and losers via the use of the photo-finish camera. Additionally, it has assisted in the scientific analysis of the sportized body, following, for example, the pioneering work of Etienne Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.1 A photograph is obviously different from a written text in that it is an iconic 95 representation, but problems of representation remain. Today, there is as much a crisis of representation in photography as there is in writing. A photograph can be read in many ways. There are no right or wrong answers to questions about what a photograph says about, for example, power, race, gender, and identity, and images are both denotative and connotative.2 My approach in this chapter is loosely based on the work of the visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards.3 I want to highlight the ambiguity of a photograph (figure 4.1) that is often read as representing the fantastic sporting achievement of an African native from the period of early twentieth-century colonization. However, knowledge of the context of the image leads me to conclude that it is far from innocent. It may appear to be an image of an athletic achievement, but it also carries a large number of connotations. It cannot even be said to be representing a sporting event although it could easily be constructed as one. The image under consideration is, in many ways, typical of a sports photograph . Central to sports photography is the striking image of the human body in action. It can, however, be connected to wider issues and identities. As David Rowe observes, “the body in sports photography is always invested with a wider representational role, as sexualized, gendered, racialized, and so on.”4 Another quality of sports photography is its ability to “capture” (an appropriate metaphor in the context of colonial photography) the “action shot,” or to be “caught in the act.” The action shot serves to record extraordinary performances such as Roger Bannister breaking the tape at Oxford in the first four-minute mile or the clenched fist of the athletes making the black power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The sports photograph usually represents a triumphant body that is motivated to do something supremely athletic with itself.5 In colonial photography, action shots (sometimes posed) were common in the depiction of a variety of indigenous body-cultural practices. These included dancing, wrestling, throwing, rowing, running, and jumping. The photograph shown as figure 4.1 satisfies the criteria that Rowe recognizes as characterizing the sports photograph. It is indeed a striking image that captures and freezes the crucial moment when the athlete clears the rope; it is a triumphant, black body. However, like the sports photographic image, frozen in time and space, the image of the colonized body “is never entirely ‘still’; it is always subject to revision and reformulation according to prevailing social ideologies and the circulation of cultural ‘data.’”6 In this chapter I will first seek to set the event photographed in some kind of context , including possible intentions at the moment of “photographic inscription .”7 I will then deconstruct some spatial aspects of the photograph and finally examine “acts” undertaken on it...

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