Rangefinder Magazine

Profile: Richard Corman
Glory: Photographs of Athletes
P.J. Heller

What does Miss Porter’s School girl’s varsity lacrosse team have in common with a contortionist from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus?

For that matter, what connection is there between actor Blair Underwood and basketball great Michael Jordan? Or how about the link between New York City ballet dancer Deanna McBrearty and skateboarder Marcus Schaffer? Then there’s the curious tie between New York City bike messenger Kyra Nichols and Olympic downhill skier Picabo Street.

The answer is that they—and a host of others—are among the subjects photographed by Richard Corman in his book, Glory: Photographs of Athletes.
It’s not a book filled with action shots of Michael Jordan flying through the air doing slam dunks or Muhammad Ali standing over and taunting a decked Sonny Liston. Rather, says the New York City-based Corman, “it’s a story about the human spirit.”
The book includes not only well-known athletes like Jordan and Ali but Special Olympians as well.

“You look at the book and see layouts with an athlete we all recognize next to a Special Olympian,” Corman explained. “It makes them both stronger. In effect, they both have their own sense of passion and glory and integrity and vulnerability. That is what this book has come to be about.”

Corman, a portrait photographer who apprenticed nearly two decades ago with Richard Avedon—“I would never be doing what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years or so if hadn’t been for that experience,” he says—admitted that Glory was pretty much of an afterthought.

“It wasn’t something I set out to do,” he explained. “It just evolved.”

Over the years, Corman has shot for clients including Nike, Reebok, Levi’s, Pepsi, IBM and the New York City Ballet. (He is represented by Stockland Martel in New York). But it was his personal work with the Special Olympics where the book idea began to take shape.
“I love sports. It’s always been a big part of my life,” he said. “It wasn’t until I photographed the Special Olympians that I really and truly understood the heart and soul, the passion, the spirit behind the games and sports.”

It is that passion that Corman has tried to capture in the coffee-table book published by William Morrow & Co. All of the photos are in black-and-white, shot on either Kodak Plus-X or Tri-X film. Only one image in the book, of track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee, was digitally manipulated.

“I’m a traditionalist,” Corman said.

“The pictures are really simple,” he added. “There’s nothing gimmicky about them. I think they’re more classical in nature. It’s the way I see things now. It is what it is.”

The cover photo of Ali, for example, is a view Corman said is rarely seen of the former heavyweight boxing champ. He stares straight into the lens of Corman’s Hasselblad camera, both of his hands touching his forehead.

“I asked Ali to put his hands up and all of a sudden I realized we had never really seen his hands before, other than when they were taped or in (boxing) gloves,” Corman said. “It made the photo a little more intimate. It brought me closer to his eyes.”

The book also contains brief essays by several writers, athletes and journalists. The foreword is by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

Although he has photographed superstars of the sporting world before—some of the photos in the book are from assignment work dating to 1984—the photo of Ali was especially poignant to Corman. Ali, who flew in to New York to be photographed by Corman for the book, was one of the photographer’s heroes when he was growing up.

Corman admitted that in many cases, the experience of photographing somebody special—like Ali—outweighs the actual photograph.

“I will always personally remember that experience,” he said of the Ali portrait session. “He (Ali) was so warm and giving. I felt after the shoot that if I never took another picture, I will have done it. I photographed him and experienced that.”

While Ali was willing to give Corman an hour in the studio, other people photographed for the book gave him minutes. Others gave him hours.

“Michael Jordan comes in and says—in the nicest way—‘Richard, you’ve got 10 minutes.’ And he gives me everything he’s got for those 10 minutes.

“That’s fine,” Corman noted. “I don’t need two hours if they’re there for me.”

He said the hardest athletes to deal with were those “who don’t care and who don’t understand that I’m not only doing this for me, but for them. It’s their image.”

Corman said he tried to go beyond the typical sports-action photos a reader would expect to find in a book featuring photos of athletes.

“For me, the most important thing was to look into their eyes,” he said. “It’s something we don’t often see. We look at Sports Illustrated and we see athletes flying through the air making great catches or performing great dunks. I certainly appreciate that. It’s just not something that I do from a picture standpoint. I’m much more interested in getting more of an emotional sense of who they are and looking into their eyes.”

Corman, for instance, wanted a photo of golfers Tiger Woods and Mark O’Meara to depict friendship.
“I wanted to do as simple a picture as I could make,” he said. “Two guys just with their arms around each other smiling. Anybody could have taken that picture. But it was more important for me to talk about something in this book, that bond that these guys have that is so wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful.”
Book photos were shot both in the studio and outdoors, using both daylight and strobes. Outdoors, a polarizer or other filter was sometimes added to accentuate the clouds or the contrast in a scene.

Corman said his fondest wish is for people who pick up the book to be moved by the images. He also hopes they come away with a feeling that they should “take some chances in their lives…allow themselves to be a little vulnerable and allow themselves to enjoy whatever—sports, writing painting…”

“It is much more important to me that people understand that I’m really writing a story here, except I’m doing it mostly with pictures,” he said. ”That’s the key.

“It’s a book on athletes, but it’s not a sports book,” he added. “I’m using athletes, they’re representing a story. They’re characters in this book. Hopefully it goes beyond sports.”

P.J. Heller operates Dateline:, a free-lance photojournalism service based in Santa Barbara, Calif. He can be reached via e-mail at [pjheller@west.net]