Photographer B.A. Van Sise brings us a new installment of his series Sweat. In his before-and-after portraits, we get a dramatic glimpse of the emotional life of players from the Metropolitan Riveters as well as a few featured professional bull riders and wrestlers.
For the last few months, I’ve been photographing athletes from a wide variety of sports as they arrive at their respective arenas and then, again, mere seconds after they come off the playing field.
The big thing I’ve learned: Some athletes like to sweat. And some athletes need to cry.
I’m not a sports analyst, a sports reporter, a sports scientist, a sports doctor, or even, really, a sports fan—and can offer little more than anecdata from my time getting to meet, however briefly, athletes from so many different stripes. Time and time again, it’s become obvious that the most striking differences from one sport to the next come down to what writer Charles Portis referred to as “true grit” in his novel of the same name.
The differences are large, and it’s hard not to notice that the more physical the sport, the better the athletes take their pratfalls in stride. Shooting roller derby ‘girls’ a few months ago, several of the competitors apologized—one of them profusely—because, after a couple hours getting knocked around, they’d forgotten my shoot and wiped the blood off their faces on their way off the track. A professional wrestler, screaming in pain from the capsaicin in his eyes after a stunt went wrong, stopped while having his face doused with milk to consider his sense of professionalism. “Wait, I need to get my photo taken,” he declared, half-and-half running down his cheeks. “Fuck it, let’s do it.” Meanwhile, the professional baseball players photographed during spring training, after three largely inert hours standing out in a field, demanded that a stylist redo their coiffures before being photographed, and most of the dozen professional bull riders I photographed—whose entire event consists of eight very tough seconds of activity—refused their ‘after’ image, because they were concerned how they’d look, visibly crying after falling off cattle.
The inverse relationship extends, it seems, to courtesy as well. While shooting Knicks basketball players—a couple dozen guys, any one of whom could have thrown my six foot, two hundred pound body like a rag doll—it was hard not to be encouraged seeing each and every player, many of them seemingly drenched skin, bone and marrow with sweat, strain themselves through their panting breath to be courteous to my assistant. In contrast, the bull riders—their every hair, hat, and buckle as firmly in place as when they’d gone out to ride a few seconds earlier—threw chairs backstage, and repeatedly asked the league’s PR rep what they could do to get out of meeting fans after the event. The very next day I photographed the Metropolitan Riveters—the National Women’s Hockey League team roughly affiliated with the New Jersey Devils—and the two dozen ladies of that team marched off the ice, looking more disheveled than any other athletes I’d seen in this series—and politely asked to move quickly—as a hundred little girls who’d attended the game were waiting patiently in the arena lobby to meet them and get their autographs, which was as clear to them, as to me, a far greater priority.
What does this all mean? My sampling size is small, and even if it weren’t . . . well, Socrates, himself a great fan of the sports of his day, once declared that “the only thing I know, is that I know nothing.”
In my last installment of this series for PEM, I suggested that I misnamed the project. Perhaps I was right. Some athletes perspire. Some athletes cry. Some do both. Maybe the work might better have been called, simply, Salt Water.
Missed part 1 of B.A. Van Sise’s Sweat series? Check it out here.
