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. On this occasion, Clarke was taking photographs for the Demons to use in their recruiting drive for the new academic year, and he invited Digital Camera along for kick-off.
