For over a century, major sporting events have been accompanied by images. With the boom in amateur photography in the late 19th century, coinciding with the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, photography and sport have, in many ways, evolved together. This exhibition reveals the vast photographic collections of the Olympic Museum and Photo Elysée. The exhibition, which was unveiled at the Rencontres d'Arles for the Paris 2024 Games, explores a largely untold photographic heritage, offering us a narrative that shines the spotlight on sports photography.

The visibility given to sports events necessarily involves photographic imagery. Pursuing performance, combining effort with gesture, the practice of sports follows precise rules and is showcased when performed for competition. The staging of sports is relayed by photographers who position themselves around the stadium.

By exploring a largely unpublished photographic heritage, the exhibition reveals the visual grammar of sports photography through several themes: the mediatization that began in Athens in 1896; the technique that seeks to capture movement through freeze frames; the composition that influences visual narration and constructs the celebration of sports; the figures that take place in the stadium where athletes face a crowd gripped with emotions; and the photographers who use sports photography as pure documentation of achievement and others as an artistic means. The numerous focuses offer us a narrative that highlights sports photography and the Olympic Games in particular.

Photo Elysée houses unique collections of more than 1,200,000 phototypes covering the entire spectrum of photographic art in all its dimensions – historical, aesthetic, technical, social and cultural – from the earliest processes dating back to the 1840s through to today’s digital images.