JUNE 14, 2007

The year’s biggest
sports moments
get surreally cut
down to size

PHOTO ESSAY: A Really Big Show

If you’ve ever watched a baseball game or tennis match from the nosebleed seats, you know how your perspective can radically alter your perception of the event: Without camera close-ups and quick TV edits, a batter’s soaring home run can get lost in a clear blue sky, and a rapid tennis volley can outpace your ability to register what’s happening. So what would these sports look like from even farther away?

In A Really Big Show, a photo essay created for Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, photographer Vincent Laforet zooms out on major sporting events like the Super Bowl and the World Series, fiddling with focus and depth of field to create singular, startling images. In his pictures, a U.S. Open final between Maria Sharapova and Justine Henin resembles a rivalry between two birthday-cake decorations, and the 2006 Kentucky Derby looks like a mechanical horse-racing machine from a vintage penny arcade. If you sometimes feel that real life has gotten synthetic and surreal, Laforet’s pictures are uncanny visual proofs of that.

A Really Big Show

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