In 1988 someone in the Spaarnestad Archive in Haarlem, Holland’s largest photo archive, showed me a pile of old football photographs. They were beautiful black and white prints of the Dutch national team’s international games from the beginning of the twentieth century until the mid-1950s. Most of the photographs were taken from behind the goal, but some from a position up in the stands. The space in the images looked so obvious to me that I wondered why I never had seen football pictures like them before.
Taken with old large-format cameras, each photograph was pin sharp. You were allowed to see the entire setting of the match. The pitch was only the foreground. You could also distinguish the faces of hat-wearing men in long coats in the opposite stand, the flags on top of the roof and the trees beyond; or traffic in a street in the distance. I found these unintentionally photographed details touching.
In the archive you could see how radically the photography of football had changed at the end of the fifties: space disappeared from the images. In a sport which is all about the position of the players on the pitch, the photographers had given up one of their most powerful weapons: the overview.
One of the reasons behind the change was a technical development. At the end of the fifties press photographers abandoned their bulky speed graphic cameras for more the more versatile 35mm format. Film became faster and, crucially, telephoto lenses arrived. From then on the typical photograph of a football match depicted two players and a ball set against an out of focus background, given no sense of where on the pitch this fragment of action had occurred. It was also around this time that television began broadcasting football matches. The role of providing the overview was taken over by television.
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