John Gress

Bruno Gmünder

John Gress

Introduction by Ivan Faute

John Gress’ photographs contain contra-dictions: the stillness of the photograph and the energy of the athlete. The strang-er’s body we observe and know more closely than our own. His captured bod-ies are ready to dive, jump or strain to the outer reaches of human capabilities. Full of the potential of explosive movement, even at rest, his athletes communicate the distillation of work, energy and dedication necessary to sculpt such a physique.

His work gives us a world we want to visit. Somehow he makes the basic blues, greens and yellows glow with the same energy as his models’ skin. Even in his black and white images he discovers new potency in the gradation and contrast. And the way he sees and reflects that skin is the most salient and beautiful quality of his work. In whatever skin tone, reflecting or absorbing the light, glistening with sweat or shimmering in anticipation of movement, when we look at these images we see skin struggling to contain the person beneath. They are the muscle and flesh of their bod-ies, but they are also the power and movement that, except for the contours of skin that Gress connects us with through such glimmering beauty, they would scatter into a blur.

These connections, even across the page, are also a part of sport. Gress captures both of these aspects of the athlete in his work. The athlete plays as part of a team, whether competing in sports like basketball and football, or against others in tennis or boxing, or even, and perhaps most ag-gressively, against his own body to run faster, jump further, achieve more than the last time. But the athlete also knows that he competes for the viewer. Always a subject of the spectator, on the field, the court, in the pool, he performs as well. And perhaps this is part of why we love to watch sports because we know that even if we can never do it as the athlete does, we can hope and dream because we have the same arms and legs and torso. The athlete shows us what could be, what we could achieve with greater perse-verance or more practice. Gress brings this out of the men he photographs, the variety of bodies that we can identify with because they are our better selves.

With minimal professional training, John Gress taught him-self to capture the athletic body through his work as pro-fessional sports photographer capturing some of the most elite athletes in professional sports. And just as the athlete is not first a model but a competitor, the subject of Gress’ gaze in these photos is not a body chiseled for modeling but refined for other purposes. It speaks to his skill that as we consume these bodies through the visually stunning surfaces, but we also feel that we know these men. Such is where John Gress’ power lies, in his ability to present to us beauty in which we can take part.