My father was the influence. He was a musician who always loved photography, and we would go to sporting events together. I got started around age 15…took a fundamentals course in photography between my junior and senior year of high school, and then had my first paid assignment for Sports Illustrated right after I graduated.
SI hired me in July 1961 to photograph an 80-something-year-old sailor who was preparing to sail from Groton, Connecticut to Florida in a boat he had built. I was 17, so my father drove me to the site. When I met the sailor, I could tell his first thought was, “Oh look, here’s dad doing the shoot and he brought his son along.” I was a boy doing a man’s job. A few months later, I shot Roger Maris’ 61st home run, which was my first huge story.
Yeah, music. Musician or photographer–those were the only two things I ever pictured. This is the only job I’ve ever had. I bagged groceries for a week or two while I was in school, but that’s it.
Players are used to coaching, just like actors are used to directors. When they come to your shoot, they expect you to take charge. I didn’t realize this back when I was a kid, but I do now. Your job is to disarm them, get the shots you need, and get them moving on with their lives. I’ve done shoots with 15 athletes in one evening where I didn’t spend more than five minutes with any one of them.
Keep it light. The truth is that almost no one really likes to be photographed. No one likes the way they look. All they see is what’s wrong with them. You have to make them not only look good, but feel like they look good. A lot of times, they need encouragement. If you get in a situation where your subject is lacking that glow, remember that no one wants to hear the problems after a shoot; they only want results. That’s what I’ve taught my son, who’s also a photographer, and I’m now teaching my grandson the same thing.
My first assignment with Michael was following him around his basketball camp in Illinois in 1987. We did “Blue Dunk”. I then shot with all of his corporate sponsors, and then I photographed him in the ’88 Slam Dunk Contest.
In ’92, on my way to Hawaii, I flew to Chicago unannounced and pitched to him the idea of an autobiography. I waited for him after a game and he said, “Oh hey, Walter, what brings you here?” I said, “I have an idea,” and showed him some photos I had taken. I explained to him, “These are going to be the pictures that tell your life story. You’ve accomplished so much, and you’re still young.” He said, “Let me think about it.”
I went on with my trip to Hawaii and then met him in L.A. a week later. That’s when he said he wanted to move forward with the book. So we shook hands and started doing the book–no money or anything, but I figured, “Heck, I can’t go wrong with this.”
Then one day Michael introduced me to (author/editor) Mark Vancil and said, “Walter, I’d like you to meet our new partner.” Mark came up with the title, “Rare Air.” At the time, no one wanted the book, but at the very last minute we sold it to Collins Publishers in San Francisco. A few months later, Michael’s father was tragically murdered, and then a few months after that, Michael announced his first retirement from basketball. The book went from boxes in the back to the front window of every store and the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list. Very surreal.
You never know who’s going to see something or where your next big connection is going to come from. It’s good to keep engaging new people all the time. I try to keep work out there that people might not see otherwise.
I’m always curious about new tools, and Your Art Gallery seems like a great platform. I wish I had something like this growing up.
Nothing happens overnight. You have to build your following and grow your skills. That’s why I’m supporting Your Art Gallery–it’s great for emerging photographers to be able to showcase their work. It takes a lot of commitment to do something you love for a living. You have to do it and see it all the time. It just becomes a part of your daily routine–you’re always looking, even when you’re not taking pictures.
People always ask me, “What do you do for personal projects?” and I say, “Everything I do is a personal project.” That’s the best way to approach it – shoot every job with the same passion. That way you can create your own projects and make the most out of every opportunity you get.
When Walter Iooss was a teenager in New Jersey, he couldn’t imagine that anything would ever replace the joy and intensity of the stickball games that absorbed his summer days. Decades have passed, and now Steve Fine, Sports Illustrated magazine’s director of photography, calls Iooss the foremost sports photographer of his generation, "a fixture in American journalism to a degree I think people who see the cover of Sports Illustrated don’t know." Iooss’s shots have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated over 300 times.
Walter was one who ran along the sidelines, a guerrilla armed with a Nikon focusing short and long lenses with amazing eye-hand coordination. He captured action in a way never seen before, and created a new, freer perspective. It was basic journalism but with a difference: extraordinary backgrounds.
As in his action shots, the portraits of SI’s swimsuit issues reveal an uncanny graphics sense and Rembrandt-like reverence for light and shadow. In 1982 he was approached by Fuji film. The teaming unleashed an epic, two-and-a-half-year project to photograph Olympic athletes up to and during the 1984 games.
During the period of work that followed Fuji, the intense essays of individual athletes he’d created at the Olympics played on his mind. In the fall of 1992, Iooss approached Michael Jordan with the idea of just such an essay. The results show the god of basketball in full flight and, perhaps more importantly, as an earthling, a human after all, amid the trappings of the upper-class athlete. Walter’s studies of Michael Jordan are classics.
"The real joy of photography is these moments," says Iooss. "I’m always looking for freedom, the search for the one-on-one. That’s when your instincts come out. I’ve been lucky enough to have people hire me to do that. Sports Illustrated never really restricts me. They want me to do what I do. It’s the discovery. It’s still magic."
