Overexposed: Capturing a secret side of sports photography

Ambiguity of images

Sontag (1977) compares photography to modern poetry, noting that both are concerned with “wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity” (p.96). Thus, as a confounding factor in considering these types of voyeurism, the availability of all manner of images on the internet means that photographs do not have to be taken deliberately for prurient purposes in order for them to be used that way. Images taken innocuously, including, for example, images posted to Facebook or other social networking sites, commonly find their way into collections of voyeuristic or pornographic images hosted on the internet (e.g., Popkin, 2012; Srivastava, 2011). The interpretive ambiguity of images, which can drastically change how an image is read depending on its context (Barrett, 1985), makes the issue of sports voyeurism much more complex. In the water polo case, for example, parents confirmed that some of the photographs in question were originally posted by the athletes’ family members to websites like Flickr, with the intent of sharing them with friends and family (Reid and Albano, 2008b).

The fact that the same photograph can be a family snapshot in one context and a pornographic image in another illustrates the difficulty of defining pornography precisely; whether something qualifies as such is often highly contingent on historical, social, or cultural contexts (Rea, 2001). In general, the difficulty in saying definitively whether or not something is pornographic has to do with a tension between definitions “that hold that the defining feature of pornography is that it is intended to produce sexual arousal or in fact has the effect of producing sexual arousal” (Rea, 2001: 132). There is little ambiguity in the case of many photographs that are taken specifically for pornographic publications; it is the photographs with the potential for effecting sexual arousal in certain people that are much harder to identify as such. In the context of sports photography, it is possible to imagine even the most straightforwardly documentary of images being capable of arousing sexual feelings in a viewer, and the point at which that fact becomes wholly or partially the responsibility of the photographer is far from clear.

Legal definitions of obscenity tend to disregard the potential effect of an image on a viewer in favor of testing the image against a hypothetical community standard. In the United States, the standard legal determination of obscenity is based on the Miller test, which queries, among other things, whether an image would be perceived as appealing to the prurient interest by reference to contemporary community standards (Berkowitz, 2009: 204). In the context of the internet and attendant developments in imaging and file sharing technology, the Miller test is something of a red herring that diverts legal discourse away from the salient contextual issues that arise with these types of images. Although the community standard concept attempts to introduce some contextual basis for defining pornography, the fact that it relies on the hypothetical average person applying the hypothetical community standard – both virtual constructions of the law – means that its capacity to respond to the actual conditions of the use and distribution of pornographic images is often tenuous; it renders the legal definition of obscenity, in other words, responsive only to qualities that are considered inherent to a given image.

Examples such as the water polo case, where family photographs ended up adjacent to obviously pornographic images, demonstrate that the law is unprepared to deal with an image whose pornographic status is constructed by the complex technological, social, or psychological factors that form the basis of its creation and distribution. Strict interpretations of child pornography and obscenity laws have demonstrated this ambiguity in a variety of legal cases surrounding visual art and photography, including cases involving the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jock Sturges, and Bill Henson (Simpson, 2011; Stanley, 1991). Particularly illuminating is the case of Cynthia Stewart, who was charged with producing child pornography because of photographs she had taken of her eight-year-old daughter in the shower. The case was later chronicled by a neighbor, Lynn Powell (2010), who describes her experience of watching one photograph of the child, ostensibly a record of the pleasure a mother would take “in the miracle of her own child,” distort into a “sexual invitation” to someone “trained to look for the sordid beneath the guise of innocence” (Strother, 2010). A photograph of an athlete that appears in a collection of pornographic images on an internet forum may not be obscene under the law, but its existence in that context is still underscored by the kinds of social and emotional harms that the law purportedly aims to prevent.

Legal weakness

In general, criminal law has failed to keep up with advances in technology (Bell et al., 2006). Upskirting, for example, has occupied a “gray cloud” of legality since it first emerged into the mainstream (Reid and Albano, 2008a), generally because the law holds that people are not entitled to an expectation of privacy when they are in public places (Bell et al., 2006; Zeronda, 2010). Attempts to legislate against upskirting, such as the Virginia law passed against placing a camera between a person’s legs to record “intimate parts or undergarments covering those intimate parts” (Bell et al., 2006: 304), generally fail to take into account the scope of possibilities offered to a voyeur by modern technology. In addition, the possibility of legislating against the use of otherwise innocuous photographs as pornography, as in the case of images posted to Flickr or Facebook, tends to conflict quite directly with the protection of free speech. In the English case Graham vs. Kerr, in which a swimming instructor was accused of taking a photograph of a nude boy at a swimming pool, the accused was acquitted on the grounds that the photograph itself was not inherently indecent; “even though the defendant had said he derived sexual gratification from taking and looking at such photographs, the secret motive of a defendant was irrelevant to the question of its indecency” (Edwards, 2000: 4).

In this context, the photographer implicated in the water polo case denied any wrongdoing, stating that he was falsely accused of being a sexual predator for “merely taking pictures of athletes at water polo events” (Reid and Albano, 2008a). After a year of paid administrative leave while the university investigated the matter, Mr Cornelius was returned to his police dispatch position after the investigation was completed, according to a UCI spokesperson, “to the satisfaction of both parties.” In addition, the Orange County District Attorney’s office conducted an investigation that concluded Mr Cornelius “did not commit any crimes” (Albano, 2009).

Victims’ experiences

Whether taking a particular image is illegal, then, has little bearing on the potential for harm that the prurient use of that image can inflict on the victim. Like an upskirt photograph, a voyeuristic photograph of an athlete draws attention to parts of the body that the athlete would not likely have consented to have on display. Outrage, shame, and humiliation are likely outcomes (Zeronda, 2010: 1133).

Although athletes whose images have been used as pornography have not commonly described the experience to the public, victims of other forms of voyeurism have been available more frequently to comment on the experience. In an article published in The Guardian (Saner, 2009), the actor Emma Watson recounts experiencing an “open season” on taking pictures up her skirt on the night of her 18th birthday: “one photographer lay down on the floor to get a shot up my skirt. … I woke up the next day and felt completely violated by it all.” But it can be more distressing for someone whose photograph is taken without their knowledge. Lucy Parkinson, who was interviewed by The Guardian in the same article, was a victim of a surreptitious video voyeur: “I hadn’t even noticed it happening,” she recalled, “and that’s the most unsettling part – in a city, you just don’t notice physical proximity to strangers. It could have happened a dozen other times too, for all I know.” Similarly, an 18-year-old student whose Facebook photographs had been posted on a pornography website acknowledged that “being on a child porn website just makes me look bad as a person” (Popkin, 2012). With sports photography, telephoto lenses and lightning-fast shutter speeds give photographers a virtual proximity to the athletes that puts the victims at a similar disadvantage. Despite knowingly competing in events that are open to the public, athletes have no knowledge or control over when images of their bodies are taken, what position they are in at the time photographs are being taken, who in the audience is taking their picture, or what happens to the images that are not published in mainstream publications. Like any individual in a public place, in the context of emergent forms of digital voyeurism, their control over their image is severely curtailed by the possibilities afforded reprobates by modern technology, both as producers and consumers of media.

Bias in coverage of sports news

In general, the profession of sports journalism is dominated by white men (Claringbould et al., 2004; Elling and Luijt, 2009), which is a factor that researchers have linked to biased media representations in favor of men (Hardin et al., 2006). Although routine coverage of women’s sports in newspapers and television programs was virtually non-existent until fairly recently, in part due to women’s lower involvement in sports prior to such legislative advancements as Title IX in the United States (Shugart, 2003), most research has shown that routine coverage of women’s sports has not expanded in proportion to the increase in women’s involvement in sport (e.g., Bishop, 2003). Bruce et al. (2010) wrote a thorough review of the relevant literature, for example, and indicated that on average, approximately 10 percent of television and newspaper sports coverage is devoted to women’s events.

Even in cases where coverage of female athletes tends to be more prevalent, such as during the Olympic games, there is still a tendency for news outlets to focus disproportionately on women in “gender-appropriate” sports, such as figure skating or gymnastics, or those, in other words, “which depict females in aesthetically pleasing motions and poses, emphasizing the erotic physicality rather than the strength of the female body” (Daddario, 1992: 51). Numerous studies examining the imbalance of coverage between genders, both in quantity and quality, in events such as the Olympic Games (e.g., Bissell and Duke, 2007; Bruce et al., 2010; Daddario, 1994; Duncan, 1990; Jones et al., 1999; Markula, 2009a) have reported underrepresentation of female athletes and the use of strategies of marginalization that maintain stereotypical ideals of femininity.

Most common among these strategies is the tendency for media outlets to focus more energetically on the female athletes’ aesthetic appearance than on their athletic achievements, or else to focus on their aesthetic appearance to a degree that would not be seen in comparable coverage of men’s events. King (2007) notes that “female athletes’ sporting achievements are often trivialized through stereotypical, and often sexualized views, and that journalists continue to associate sportswomen more with appearance than performance” (p.188). Similarly, Eastman and Billings’ (2000) analysis of newspaper, television, and magazine sports coverage in the United States indicated “a lingering tendency to use women athletes for their glamour or sex appeal without serious treatment of their activities” (p.204). With regard specifically to written accounts, Lee (1992) indicates, based on newspaper coverage of the 1984 and 1988 summer Olympic games, that women tended to be described more often than men in ways that juxtaposed their strengths with their weaknesses, or in ways that attended disproportionately to information unrelated to their performance, such as descriptions of the shape of their body. While a good part of this strategy involves objectification of the athletes – a minimization of their depiction as athletes actually engaged in sport – it can also involve sexualization of the performance itself, affirmation of the athlete’s heterosexuality through increased attention paid to her relationships with men, or the use of asexuality as a foil in cases where the athlete upsets traditional notions of femininity (Shugart, 2003).

Several specific studies are worth mentioning in this context for illustration. Duncan’s (1990) analysis of magazine photographs pertaining to the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games indicated that images that highlighted the breasts and buttocks of the athletes had a greater tendency to be selected for publication, and that many images depicted the athletes in poses “that bear a striking resemblance to those of women in soft-core pornography” (p.29). More recently, Bissell and Duke (2007) undertook a study of American television coverage of the US women’s volleyball team games during the 2004 Olympics, and observed that a preponderance of camera shots were focused on the breasts or buttocks of the athletes. Approximately a fifth to a third of the camera shots analyzed were coded as chest shots, and just under a fifth were coded as buttock shots. In fact, they observed that there appeared to be a directorial influence on the types of shots selected – “Misty May often slapped [Kerri] Walsh’s buttock as a form of celebration or support, and the camera operators became quickly trained to capture this motion with a tight shot of Team USA’s buttocks” (p.41).

There is also evidence that the sexualization of athletes by the news media is not just relegated to North America. Wu (2009), for example, notes that the quantitative imbalance between genders is similarly exhibited by the Chinese media, which, from a qualitative perspective, also has a tendency to focus on the bodies of female athletes rather than their sporting performances; based on a review of the Chinese literature on the subject, she concludes that “the trivialisation and sexualisation of female athletes in media coverage, which are found commonly in the West, are also overt and blatant in China” (p.74). Her analysis of Chinese newspapers during the 2004 summer games in Athens noted, as an example, the frequency with which a particular female diver, Guo Jingjing, was referred to as a “goddess,” including one article in which the athlete’s “sexy swimming suit” was described as making her appear “beautiful and attractive” (p.76). Sexualized representations of foreign (Western) female athletes were also noted by Koh (2009) in Korean newspaper coverage during the same summer games, and similar observations have been made in Finland (Markula, 2009b) and the Netherlands (Elling and Luijt, 2009).

Cultural and institutional factors

In most news media organizations, journalists and photographers are grouped into areas of specialization, and people working within each area tend to have specific values, attitudes, behaviors, social nuances, and ways of being that identify them as unique groups of professionals (Keats and Buchanan, 2009). Specifically, Oates and Pauly (2007) see sports photographers and journalists as stereotypically egotistical, socially ignorant, overly aggressive, and highly competitive. In addition, when compared to other areas of news reporting, women working in sports journalism report a greater degree of marginalization and discrimination (Eastman and Billings, 2000). This point is clearly illustrated in Hardin et al.’s (2006) study on textbooks for sports journalism courses, which generally endorse a male bias and promote “gender stereotypes of sports, sports writing, and sports writers” (p.441), hence maintaining patterns of gender discrimination in all areas related to sports. Eastman and Billings (2000) describe “sportscasts that seem to speak a private male-only language and operate rather as private clubs for men” (p.192). They report male newscasters’ tendencies to address sports issues they are most familiar with (men and men’s sports) and to direct their reporting to daily sports consumers (men), which manifests in mostly favorable descriptions of male athletes and men’s sports. This positioning is problematic, especially if the sports audience sees “sports reporting as a form of cultural representation” (Oates and Pauly, 2007: 333); in effect, stereotypical group identities based on gender, societal values skewed in favor of men, and denigration of female athletes and their sporting events are sustained.

As an illustration, Messner et al. (2003) conducted a 10-year study of visual and verbal aspects of sports news, and found a disturbing preponderance of segments where women athletes were shown and described in sexually objectified ways (e.g., a female athlete described as a “sexy villainess,” or photographs of a high-level female tennis player with jokes about what a man had to do to “date” her). These authors describe the prevalence of journalists’ assumptions about “who their audiences are and what they want to see,” and the unregulated delivery of “visual moments of sexual voyeurism peppered with locker-room humor” (p.49).

Other studies have illustrated that the idea of providing what the audience wants to see, often presented as a justification for the sexualized representations of female athletes, is one of a number of cultural and institutional factors that influence the nature of the news media’s coverage. Theberge and Cronk (1986) note, on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a US newspaper, that “The exclusion [of women from news coverage] is woven into newsworkers’ beliefs about the contents of the news and their own methods of uncovering the news. … Their reliance upon bureaucratic news sources and the standardization of the production process mean that newsworkers routinely define sports news as news about men’s sports” (p.195). Based on research by Knoppers and Elling (2004), it appears that certain sports journalists downplay their own agency by attributing the biased coverage to institutional factors over which they have no control, such as the commercial imperative to provide content that the audience wants to see, or external factors such as the athletes’ own decisions. “You can say that pictures of women focus on their short skirts but who puts those skirts on?” one male journalist asks. “Not my male colleagues … But the women athletes do that. They think that the more skin they show, the more attention they will receive … They get the attention they want” (p.64). Another male sports journalist appeals to the commercial imperative: “Of course these shots occur because beautiful women sell. We try not to do that but I cannot deny that it happens” (p.64). According to Knoppers and Elling, the commercial logic “allows them to present women athletes in sexualized ways because the readers/viewers find that ‘interesting’ (and because the women athletes themselves are assumed to prefer that)” (p.67).

As an additional factor, competition for career advancement, recognition, and financial gain is common among sports journalists as individuals. Banagan (2011) claims that entitlement is a core belief within this group that motivates within certain individuals a desire to maintain or increase one’s status in the sports world through self-promotion. Undoubtedly, this creates questionable journalistic practices that are “above reproach” (p.164). For example, Oates and Pauly (2007) describe promotional activities within sports journalism that support interdependence between “itself and its corporate partners (the teams and leagues)” (p.339). Certainly, if particular styles of depicting athletes were liable to promote readership, there would be a low likelihood that collateral exploitation would be regulated.

The sexualization of female athletes in the news media cannot always be considered deliberate, as the choices that are made on a day-to-day basis that result in biased representations, such as which photographs to feature where, are made in a context of cultural factors that are taken for granted, as a matter of course, rather than queried appropriately – not only in the newsrooms themselves, but in the larger public that consumes the news media. As Shugart (2003) notes, “the hegemonic potential of that coverage is profound; packaged as progress, equality, and power, the mediated contemporary female athlete instead delivers highly traditional female sexuality. Strong, we are told, is sexy; this sounds like progress, but in fact, it is an appropriation in which female strength has been redefined as male pleasure” (p.27). As the interviews by Knoppers and Elling (2004) illustrate, this hegemony makes it simple for the agents in the process to defer responsibility or justify their actions in the minority of cases where they are even able to recognize a bias. According to Wensing and Bruce (2003), “even at its best, media coverage of women athletes tends to be ambivalent, meaning that it juxtaposes positive descriptions and images with descriptions and images that undermine and trivialize women’s efforts and successes” (p.387).

Research

From a theoretical perspective, literature regarding the field of sports journalism, such as the sources discussed above, has a lot to offer an exploration of voyeuristic images taken of female athletes. However, particularly problematic is that one of the only episodes of sports voyeurism to garner any significant news coverage, the water polo case, involved images of male athletes that appeared on pornography websites aimed at gay men. Other cases of men using images of male athletes for prurient purposes have also been recorded (e.g., Edwards, 2000; Pack, 2009). While it is certainly the case that men are not excluded from the processes of sexualization that occur within the sports journalism community, in the sense that many of these processes reinforce norms of masculinity, the use and distribution of voyeuristic images among gay men is an interesting facet of this phenomenon that deserves to be explored in much more depth. As noted by Morrison (2004), “despite the apparent ubiquity of gay pornography, and gay men’s evident familiarity with the medium, academics – particularly those in the social sciences – have been curiously mute on this topic” (p.2). Similarly, homosexuality typically only arises in sports research with regard to gay athletes, in the context of homophobia among athletes and sports news media (e.g., Hardin et al., 2009; Kian and Anderson, 2009), for example, or the experience of coming out (e.g., Gough, 2007), with negligible attention paid to gay men as viewers of sport. Considering that pornography is generally used more openly among gay men than straight men (Thomas, 2010), further exploration of this aspect of sport viewership would likely provide key insights into the nature of sports-related voyeurism.

With regard to exploring the link between sports-related voyeurism and cultural or institutional factors at play within the field of sports journalism, qualitative studies involving sports photographers may be the most direct way of exploring the knowledge of voyeuristic activities within the community. As noted, in our personal communication with the three photojournalists, it became apparent that journalists may be reluctant to talk about the issue because of the potential for negative implications regarding their careers or reputations. For this reason, research designs need to emphasize strict confidentiality.

Studies involving athletes and their coaches are also likely to be fruitful, particularly in elucidating the potential impact on the victims of these kinds of images. Our correspondence indicated that some athletes are aware that such images had been taken of them and inappropriately distributed, and their perspectives would be invaluable. As an additional issue, the sportswear of many athletes, both male and female, is mandated by their sponsors or other regulations (MacDonald, 2009); in 2004, for example, the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) president Sepp Blatter went on record recommending that female soccer players ought to wear more revealing uniforms in order to bring more attention to the game (Millward, 2004). The role of their clothing in increasing the ease with which these images are taken, and more generally the role of clothing in sexualizing athletes, needs to be explored in depth as a key part of this investigation. In addition, the role of athletes posing for adult magazines and other publications, often for promotional purposes and in exchange for payment (e.g., Bissell and Duke, 2007; Koh, 2009) cannot be ignored for contributing to the sexualization of female athletes in the media, or at least the perceived permissibility of doing so.

Speaking with individuals from the internet community, including webmasters and online safety organizations, such as the aforementioned WiredSafety, will likely also prove fruitful, particularly in clarifying the extent of the problem, the source of many of the images, and the processes through which the images are shared and distributed online.

Potential solutions to explore