Shooting sportraits with James Clarke
Following the gameplan
Professional photographer James Clarke has imported an American style of sporting portraiture. Niall Hampton sees how it plays on home turf
James Clarke Photographer
Specialising in shooting sport and fitness, and as passionate about photography as he is about sport, Clarke can draw on over two decades of experience in the sporting world. www.justjamesmedia.com
Question: what do you get if you have a sports player posing for a stylised portrait photo? A ‘sportrait’, that’s what. It’s not a genre we’d come across before in Digital Camera Towers, so we were surprised and delighted to discover that a practitioner of sportraits was based within 100 miles of us – and not on the other side of the pond. James Clarke is a big fan of American sport and sporting culture and has imported ‘sportraiture’, for want of a better word, to the UK. He has also given it his own twist, eschewing the studio shoot approach of the US variant and opting instead to work with the athletes on the playing field, to give his photos extra context. One of these locations is Exeter University, where Clarke has teamed up with the Exeter Demons, BUCS [British Universities and Colleges Sport] Division 1 National Champions 2023-2024. Today, Clarke will be taking photographs that the Demons will use in their recruiting drive for the new academic year, and he has invited Digital Camera along for kick-off.
What is a sportrait?
“A sportrait is simply a portrait but in sports kit,” explains Clarke. “It can be static, like most of the shots today, or it can be dynamic action – in some of today’s pictures, someone was throwing a ball in the air and someone was diving onto a mat and catching it.
“For me, especially the way I want to shoot them, a sportrait is also about showing off people’s hobbies while they’re in sports kit. While that wasn’t what we were doing today, on a previous shoot I’ve photographed someone reading a book with their sports kit on, which captured their personality quite well.
“Sportraits are really big in America, obviously, not just at professional level but also in university sports and all the way down to junior level at high schools.”