Brian Wallis
In September 1986, photographer Susan Grayson made a surprising and provocative intervention in the exhibition program of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. With dozens of black-and-white photographs from her unique documentary series titled “Baseball Action Shots,” she filled the museum’s massive rear windows facing Mercer Street. On three six-by-eight foot panels Grayson displayed large grids of stop-action photographs showing three star players: Johnny Bench, Jim Palmer, and Carl Yastrzemski, all future Baseball Hall of Famers. Each grid consisted of between sixteen and twenty-three individual photographs comprising a sequence of the individual athlete going through the precise motions of pitching or hitting. Emphasizing the project’s exacting documentation, each panel included the full name of the player and the date that the photographic sequence was taken. What initially seemed like a conventional display of sports photography gradually revealed itself as a complex exercise in conceptual photography.
Grayson’s dramatic New Museum installation was evidence of a much larger, long-running archival project with roots in her advanced artistic practice. “Baseball Action Shots” was compiled over twelve years, beginning in 1980, and ultimately consisted of over 10,000 negatives documenting every Major League Baseball player from the 1980s. In those years, Grayson was able to gain full, credentialed access to New York’s Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and to Shea Stadium in Queens, home of the New York Mets, despite the fact that she was working as an artist, not a conventional sports photographer. Her archive of photographs of 1980s baseball players, including the famous as well as the not so famous, is certainly among the most comprehensive collection of its kind. Her regular subjects included New York Yankee stars Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, Ron Guidry, Ricky Henderson and Phil Niekro, as well as New York Mets stars Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Daryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, and Mookie Wilson.
Photographs from Grayson’s “Baseball Action Shots” are most often included in thematic exhibitions focusing on sports, and baseball in particular, the type of exhibitions that are reviewed by Artforum and Sports Illustrated simultaneously. But this focus on baseball, the overt subject matter of the photographs, overlooks the rich historical references and sly analytical commentary of Grayson’s work. Grayson is an expert on the history of sports photography, and has worked alongside some of of baseball’s legendary lensmen, including Ernie Sisto, Lou Requena, Neil Leifer, Walter Ioos, Bob Olen, and Harry Harris. But Grayson was interested in sports photography conceptually, as a specialized and highly structured form of popular media representation. In her 1981 video work “Yankee Broadcast,” for example, Grayson went behind the scenes and into the control room to examine how the narrative of a typical baseball game was orchestrated for broadcast television, with multiple cameras and editing cues.
As a result of this particular focus, Grayson’s “Baseball Action Shots” are different from most sports photographs, which aim to stop action and to isolate in a single frame a crucial moment in the game. Grayson, on the other hand, is interested in the sequential or serialized representation of the action. She recognizes that the essence of athletic training is to convert the unruly human body into a biomechanical machine, and she dissects the sport of baseball as a flamboyant display of routinized labor. By splitting each pitch or at bat into its component parts, Grayson’s sequential series of routinized performances by baseball players demonstrate the capacity of these athletes to replicate the same movement with seamless and uncanny precision.
This preoccupation with serial motion inevitably links Grayson’s work to the history of chronophotography and to photography’s central issue, the manipulation of time. Photographer Eadweard Muybridge, working in San Francisco in 1872, was first able to slow time through photography’s stop-action effect, and then to arrange a succession of photographed events into a consecutive line of individual moments, prefiguring motion pictures. Muybridge initially devised camera shutters that would freeze motion on a single plate, and later utilized an elaborate setup of twelve cameras fitted with electromagnetic shutters to successfully photograph the stages of a horse galloping. Taking this ambitious project to the University of Pennsylvania in 1884, Muybridge expanded his studies of human and animal movements, ultimately taking over 100,000 sequential photographs, many published as grids in his eleven-volume portfolio Animal Locomotion (1887). Fascinated by the work of Muybridge and other early photographers of time and motion—including Étienne-Jules Marey, Christian Wilhelm Braüne, and Otto Fischer—Grayson organized an installation on chronophotography for the exhibition “Parallax View” at MoMA/ P.S. 1 in 1993, establishing links between scientific gait analysis and conceptual photography.
The roots of Grayson’s conceptual approach to photography lay in her association with the noted Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1970s. There she met Bernd and Hilla Becher whose interest in serial photographic documentation led to their long-term typological study of disused industrial buildings, which they presented as grids of comparative images. The highly influential Bechers encouraged a type of conceptual photography that relied on precise, literal documentation, and on ideas and structures rather than symbolism. Key to Grayson’s later conceptual photography was the idea of a neutral or indifferent approach to her subject matter, aimed at isolating individual examples within a preconceived set of readily available vernacular subjects, without critical evaluation. Among the Kunstakademie students who Grayson met and with whom she shared these conceptual ideas were Candida Hofer, Isa Genzken, Michael Oppitz, Sigmar Polke, Reiner Ruthenbeck, and Blinky Palermo. Grayson even appears in Isa Gezken’s performance-based film “Zwei Frauen im Gefecht” ("Two Women In Combat”), from 1974, in which the two women hilariously swap a sequential series of outfits despite their dramatically different body types.
In 1977, Genzken also helped Grayson with a window installation at Konrad Fisher Gallery showing a Muybridge-like series of sequential photographs of different somatotypes, or human body types, walking. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Grayson transferred these ideas about conceptual photography to New York with a series of slide projections and other projects presented at various galleries. Her exhibition “Walk—Read—Listen” shown at the alternative space 112 Greene Street in SoHo in 1976, included her earlier works, “Walk” (1973), “Read” (1974), and “Listen” (1976). “Walk,” shot by filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, was particularly notable in this context as it consisted of a forty-foot-long strip of tiny contact prints of each frame showing Grayson striding across the room. As Grayson said at the time, “The object of these works is to incorporate the meaning of the verb within a method of practice.” Her structural analysis of motion and time in relation to photographic documentation of human performance was crucial to her later work on “Baseball Action Shots.”
By 1986, it was clear that Grayson’s “Baseball Action Shots” series was the culmination her early efforts to establish a conceptual approach to photography by applying its serial language of motion deconstruction to the routinized performance of sports. Like the baseball players she photographed, Grayson’s method depended on her establishing a certain set of rules or practices and replicating them over and over, precisely and routinely. Emphasizing the factual, almost scientific precision of her approach to photographic documentation, Grayson succeeded in creating a comprehensive archival record not only of baseball but also of the methods for a conceptual analysis and presentation of photography.