"You shoot for a very powerful portrait or you try to shoot and catch ’em off guard, where there is a moment that is sort of surprising and just takes you away from the ordinary… A lot of the times the best pictures are happening when your camera is down, because the subject relaxes.” - Walter Iooss
Widely considered the world’s most influential sports photographer and dubbed as “the Rembrandt of sports photography” due to his use of light and shadow, color, and composition, Walter Iooss Jr.’s images transcend the fame of his subjects and have come to represent modern sports culture. But the secret to his success is a carefully crafted rapport with his subjects. As a result, his work has forever changed the definition of what a “good sports photograph" should be.
Born to a family of sports fans in Texas in 1943, Iooss discovered photography aged 15 when his father gave him a camera. Within a year, he had begun photographing professional football games, and at just 17, he got his first assignment for Sports Illustrated. By 20, he was shooting the magazine’s covers.
Iooss’s images have appeared on over 300 covers of Sports Illustrated—more than any other photographer in the world. In a career spanning more than 60 years, he has worked with almost every athlete at the top of their game, including Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Pele, Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Kobe Bryant.
“You know you’ve got [basketball star] Michael Jordan and it’s not so hard to take a good picture of him. Is it more difficult to take a great picture? I think so, yeah. You’re always going for something dramatic.” - Walter Iooss
Iooss has photographed every single one of the first 52 Super Bowls; published a book on the 18 months he spent following US athletes as they prepared for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles called Shooting for the Gold; created a New York Times bestselling photo essay, Rare Air, with Michael Jordan; and shot campaigns for the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and more.
In more recent years, his pictures have been the subject of several gallery shows and a solo artist auction at Christie’s New York in 2020 called Athlete: Photographs by Walter Iooss, Jr. The exhibitions include Athlete: The Sports Illustrated Photography of Walter Iooss at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in 2009; Sport: Iooss and Leifer at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009; and LEGENDS: The Sports Photography of Walter Iooss at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut in 2019-2020.
In 2018, Iooss was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.