Towards a Level Playing Field - Australian Sports Commission

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10 Towards a Level Playing Field: sport and gender in Australian media Figure 2: Example shots of athletes in family/relationship context shots Mo’onia Gerrard with her brother [#367] (Nick Cubbin/Fairfax photos) Heather Langman with her father [#290] (Newspix/Justin Sanson) Tamsyn Lewis with her dog [#286] (Newspix/Aaron Francis)
We also looked at the relationship that images potentially set up with the viewer on the basis of research (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Hall 1964, 1966), which suggests we each carry with us a set of invisible boundaries that determine the distance we keep from others (for a fuller explanation of these sensory confi gurations see Kress and van Leeuwen 2006:124–5). In terms of press photography, a close-up shot allows a more intimate relationship with the person photographed. A mid shot, usually cut off around waist level, enacts a social relationship, while a long shot is seen as enacting a public relationship between the viewer and represented participant. Of course, there are many other visual conventions that affect the way we understand an image. For example, some sexualised images show the body from a distance and may include the woman or man averting their eyes to encourage the viewer to feel comfortable with gazing at their body. In our survey then, the measure of social distance from the viewer is only presented as a general measure of the intimacy with which viewers are encouraged to engage with female athletes, not as a defi nitive test. Our qualitative analysis of images of female athletes also relied on a wider range of visual conventions that gave us a more contextual sense of whether a woman was being sexualised or set apart for her physical attributes. In our archive, nearly 90% of all images were shot from either a public or social distance, which means that female athletes were usually photographed from either the waist up or showing their full body. Few images (13%) were close-up shots. Table 23 summarises the results for social distance analysis. Table 23: Image count by social distance Social distance # of images % of corpus Public 65 37 Social 87 50 Intimate 22 13 The majority of mid to full-length shots of female sports players did not focus in any particular way on their bodies. The only images that might be understood as glamorising and/or sexualising were published in magazines and the majority of these were published in contexts where male athletes also appeared in similar poses. The trend towards glamorising and sexualising star athletes appears to work across gender boundaries. Figure 3: Examples of social distance Close-up shot enacting an intimate relationship [#20] (Newspix/Aaron Francis) Mid-length shot enacting a social relationship [#141] (Orlando Chiodo/Fairfax photos) Long shot enacting a public relationship [#111] SECTION ONE 11
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Towards a Level Playing Field - Australian Sports Commission

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