Circulation

Sports images are circulated seemingly everywhere through a media network that has its roots in the late 19th century and continues growing today. Whether moving or still, they occupy a variety of formats, from black-and-white and color photographs to movies and streaming video. Since the 1890s sports images have filled dedicated sports sections in the world’s newspapers, reaching a mass audience and becoming a powerful part of daily life and experience. As the captions affixed to the backs of newspaper photographs in this exhibition illustrate, such pictures are also republished in new contexts, with new audiences.

Since the 1930s, picture stories on sports and sports stars have been published in magazines such as Look (1937—1971), Life (1883—), and Sports Illustrated (1954—). The 1970s saw televised sports being broadcast in prime time, a development that has produced immense profits for networks, professional teams, and players. Today, sports images animate millions of cell-phone screens and Facebook pages, feeding a world populace whose appetite for sports of all types seems insatiable. In 2011, an average of 111 million people watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL Super Bowl.