Just like the previous section, the third section deals with depicting bodies, too. Similar to its predecessor, this section also combines close analyses of visual material from the realm of sports with more general questions about their historiographic value. Dr. Markus Stauff from the University of Amsterdam scrutinises a photograph of Dorando Petri, who finished the marathon of 1908 Olympics, but who was disqualified as he had assistance over the course of the marathon. From his analysis of this photograph, Stauff elaborates on the concept of media literacy. Following up on his thoughts about this particularly kind of knowledge, he then expands his thoughts towards further types of knowledge, bound to the statistics of sports. Next to statistics there is a further visual segment of the sports' world, which Jörn Eiben from the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg investigates: drawings from the birds'-eye-perspective. He argues that such drawings are part of a corpus of “practical pictures”, which participate in establishing a certain school of seeing space. Even though they do not represent distinct shapes of bodies, he argues, such depictions are nevertheless depictions of sporting bodies in that they tie players to their positions. Amanda Shuman, who currently works at the University of Freiburg, concludes the section and provides a very necessary view on the visual realm outside Europe and North America. Shuman focuses on the visual dimensions of two education programs about healthy behaviour, its interrelations with the narrative about China as the sick man of Asia and the representations of Chinese athletes.
Markus Stauff | Understanding Performance. Media Literacy and the Visual Culture of Sports