Sportscape: The Evolution of Sports Photography

Rating:
Summary: allsport
Review: Slightly unfair review by the previous reviewer, when they say the book doesn't have all the great photos of the last 50 years. It is made fairly clear by the tag line of the book that it IS a collection of photos from the Allsport and Hulton-Getty. Anyway, for me, it was enlightening to see a lot of extraordinary photos that I had never seen before. I've already seen the really famous ones !!

Rating:
Summary: Yet another great book from ALLSPORT
Review: Sports photography is both a fascinating medium and one which has stood the test of time. Despite the onset of the digital camera and computer generated images, the craft remains fresh, yet few give thought to the creativity and skill of our best sports photographers. Sportscape shows in detail the creativity, efforts and techniques that world - class photographers use to take the stunning pictures we see in newspapers, magazines and other printed media. Many great pictures feature in the book taken by photographers such as Clive Brunskill and Adam Pretty. I recommend it for anyone with a keen interest in the art.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful book, but...
Review: This mammoth book does a wonderful job of displaying some brilliant sports images, and does a fairly good job tracking the evolution of sporting photography from static view-camera shots to today's cinemaesque, remote-camera action images. But as an actual history of sports photography, it's a bit lacking. The editors apparently felt content to limit their selection of photos to those in the Allsport and Hulton-Getty agency archives, and so a large chunk of the notable sporting images and history from the last century are just plain not there.

Where's Neil Leifer's picture of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over Sonny Liston after knocking him out in 1965? Where are any of a dozen other seminal pictures? The answer: not here, because they weren't taken by an Allsport or a Hulton-Getty photographer. This is a book that, according to the index, contains not a SINGLE mention of or image from Sports Illustrated, probably the single largest and most defining force in sports photography in the last 50 years.

Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive book that displays some fantastic and great-but-obscure images well. Just don't buy it thinking you're getting a complete survey and overview of sports photography from its beginnings to the present.