The photographer, Utah native David Burnett, got the shot because he left the pack of photogs at the finish line and camped out instead, unmolested, near the track's final turn.
"The fall happened right in front of me. It's hard to feel like a voyeur in a crowd of thousands, but it was almost like an extremely private moment," he says of the resulting photo, which ran in Time magazine and around the world. "Pretty much everybody knows that image, even if they don't know who shot it."
At a time when almost every big public event is exhaustively documented by a horde of still and video photographers, going against the pack has served Burnett well. Over a 40-year career he has won numerous awards for his photographs of the Vietnam War, the famine in Ethiopia, the Olympics, Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and every U.S. president since John F. Kennedy.
Now Burnett, who lives in northern Virginia, is returning to his home state for a major solo exhibition at the Kimball Art Center in Park City. "Managing Gravity," a collection of three dozen of his best sports photos, opened Saturday in the Kimball's Main Gallery, where it will remain until March 11. The show contains the iconic Decker image plus photos of baseball players and other Olympic athletes, some captured at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
Sports photos in an art gallery? Why not? For starters, Burnett doesn't see the point of erecting boundaries between art and photojournalism. After all, both seek to capture an indelible image while stirring something in the viewer. And while Burnett's best-known sports photo may be his straightforward shot of the fallen Decker, most of his images of athletes are distinctive for their abstract mystery.
Take his black-and-white underwater shot of an anonymous swimmer exploding off the wall of a pool, arms outstretched and legs awash in a trail of bubbles.
"With a lot of my [sports] pictures, there's no telling who it is. And in many ways, you don't need to know. It's much more a question of trying to capture the grace and the visual poetry. You're looking to somehow boil it down to its most elemental part," says Burnett, 60. "I try not to worry about who's going to win. What I'm looking for is a sense of what it was like to be there, and the emotion involved."
The Kimball's Adam Bateman, who is working with Burnett on the show, said he initially questioned sports photojournalism as fine art. But as he has seen more of Burnett's work, Bateman realized it has much in common with "fine art."
"There is a current trend in fine-art photography where conceptual artists make little teensy models that they then photograph to make the models look like the real thing. I've seen it in Europe and L.A. and New York.
"Burnett has been doing something that sort of revolutionized photojournalism in that, instead of using telephoto lenses, he's using wide angles and capturing the whole setting of the event . . . making it look like a diorama. In that way, he's very much engaging in a dialogue with these fine-art photographers."
Plus, Bateman added, Burnett's technical skill is "astounding. When you see his prints in person, they're amazing."
Burnett says he was first drawn to photography as a teenager in the early 1960s at Olympus High School, where he snapped photos for the yearbook. He photographed his first president in 1963, when Kennedy visited Salt Lake City. Burnett, then 17, borrowed a 35mm camera and staked out the lobby of the Hotel Utah for the president to arrive. The resulting image was blurry and slightly underexposed, but Burnett learned fast.
By the time he was in college, he was interning for Time. In 1971, he became the last photographer hired by Life before the fabled magazine folded the next year. He has photographed Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bob Marley and Bill Gates. Along the way he also collected many awards - most recently a top prize from the White House News Photographers Association for a shot of President Bush's 2005 State of the Union speech.
In a digital age when fancy cameras can record eight frames per second, Burnett often shoots on film with outmoded equipment that gives him only one chance to capture a crucial moment. He has won major awards for images produced with a Holga, a $15 toy camera made of plastic. The results can be grainy, even intentionally blurry, but beautiful in an almost dreamlike way.
"There's something to the look the old cameras give you," says Burnett, who believes working with slower cameras makes him work harder to get unique shots. "You're really only shooting one [frame] at a time. But because you know that . . . it hones your senses. It changes your way of looking at stuff."
While other photographers zoom in to record faces in ever-crisper detail, Burnett often steps back to place events in larger contexts. In a world where consumers are overloaded with visual images, this maverick approach separates him from the crowd and produces images that can stop magazine readers from turning the page.
"It's harder and harder to maintain your own vision in the middle of mass craziness," he says. "But you always try to keep looking out of the corner of your eye. If everybody is looking one way, you want to look the other way."
- Tribune staff writer Anne Wilson contributed to this story.
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* BRANDON GRIGGS can be contacted at griggs@sltrib.com or 801-257-8689. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
Sports photography as art
* "Managing Gravity," an exhibition of sports photography by David Burnett, is on display through March 11 at the Kimball Art Center, 638 Park Ave., Park City. Admission is free. For more information, call 435-649-8882 or visit www.kimball-art.org.
