This sporting life

You might not have heard of him but the name Gerry Cranham transcends photography, let alone sports photography. He was only the second photographer, behind the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson, to have an exhibition at the prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum in London – this was way back in 1971, when even the idea of photography exhibitions was in its infancy. The pictorial fruits of his lengthy career are now available in the new book This Sporting Life, which was produced thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign set up and driven by his fellow sports photographer, Mark Leech, and the graphic designer, Doug Cheeseman.

Born in 1929 Cranham, who’s now almost 93 years old, was a true pioneer of sports photography. He helped to move the goalposts in sports photography from images that merely documented events to pictures that turned the sports photography genre into an art form. His use of remote cameras in the 1960s, deployment of zoom/blur techniques and his approach to underwater photography of swimming produced images that are now considered the norm but were truly groundbreaking at the time. In fact, Cranham, who was weighted down and working submerged at the time, had to be pulled out of a pool by his hair when photographing the ‘Falkirk Flyer’, swimmer Bobby McGregor, in 1964 to prevent him from drowning.

As a result of pushing