Walter Iooss Jr. likes to make athletes look heroic, like comic-book super-heroes. He composes with light and shadow and the cleanest of backgrounds, because a bad background, he says, makes for a bad picture. He famously painted two basketball courts for a photo shoot of Michael Jordan—one bright blue, the other red—to contrast whatever uniform Jordan showed up in. The resulting photo—The Blue Dunk—remains one of Iooss’s favorites.
Dubbed the Rembrandt of sports photography, Iooss (pronounced “Yoce”) has captured and in some ways defined the images of athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, and Kobe Bryant. His work has graced the covers of more than 300 issues of Sports Illustrated and inspired the recent Housatonic Museum of Art exhibition “The Making of an Icon: Walter Iooss and Sports Photography,” which was supported by a grant from Connecticut Humanities.
For this iconic photo of Edwin Moses, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time world record holder in the 400-meter hurdles, Iooss set up a huge black velvet background and positioned a hurdle and a reflector to bounce his flash. Only then did he invite in the athlete. Moses, who hadn’t competed in months, was afraid he’d be rusty, but Iooss took an initial Polaroid and said, “Oh my God, he’s back.” After hours of setup, “it took maybe 15 minutes of actual athletics.”
When dealing with famous people, it’s important not to waste their time, says Iooss, who is now eighty years old.
“If you do it well you don’t need that many times,” he says. “What I wanted was a photo that encapsulated how great he was, to show the greatest hurdler of all time. And I got it.”
