Brigitte Bowers: Local artists captures the Face of the Athlete

In the early spring of 2013, local photographer Jay Sousa kidnapped cyclists from the streets of Merced, shepherding them to a makeshift studio near the finish line of the Merco Cycling Classic.

He did not want money from them. He did not intend to hold them for political reasons. He had no intentions of extorting property or promises from them. What Jay wanted was their photographs.

Jay had a concept.

He wanted to photograph a series about bicyclists. He wanted to catch the exertion, the emotional and physical toll of competition, and he wanted to feature a sport that is often overlooked by the media, particularly in the United States. And so on that spring day three years ago, Jay stood at the finish line in downtown Merced and shanghaied cyclists as they ended the race.

Most were too exhausted – and too confused – to object.

The result was a collection of gritty, dramatic portraits. Jay felt he was on to something, and he couldn’t wait for the following year, when he would photograph the cyclists again, this time with a clearer vision of exactly what he hoped to achieve artistically from the project.

And then, in December, after the resignation of four key members, the Merco organizing committee announced its decision to cancel the race indefinitely.

Jay, though, began to conceive of another, similar project. Why not photograph other kinds of athletes, he thought, who are also underrepresented in traditional sports reporting?

Jay was not new to sports photography. After all, he’d started working for the Merced Sun-Star in 1974, when he was a junior at Merced High, and his job included taking shots for the sports page. But he had never felt confident about his action photographs.

“I was kind of a geeky kid,” Jay recalls. “I couldn’t play sports, and to be a good sports action photographer you have to really know the game. You have to be able to anticipate what will happen next so you can get ready for the shot, and I didn’t really have the knowledge or interest.”

But Jay respects athletes. He is an accomplished sailor. He hikes extensively in the Sierra Nevada. When he was younger, he was an avid cyclist. And he has always been drawn to the storytelling inherent in portraiture.

It was that narrative potential that motivated Jay to major in photojournalism at Fresno State in the early 1980s.

“I’ll probably always do school photography,” Jay states. “I love doing portraits. In fact, I first got the idea of doing the cyclist project from doing senior portraits. The students started asking me to take pictures of them in their baseball and football uniforms.”

So Jay decided to combine what he likes best about taking studio portraits – the ability to control light and experiment with technique to create dramatic effect – with his admiration for athletic achievement. He was not really very interested in the high-five shots after a victory. He was intrigued by evidence of the physical cost – the sweat, the grimace, the clenched jaw.

The result is on display in his current exhibit, “Face of an Athlete,” at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center. The photographs work together to create a coherent theme about the strength of will necessary for athletic competition. Some of the images are beautiful, such as the color portrait of volleyball player Avery Garcia. But Jay is primarily interested in exploring determination. This is highly evident in the photograph of roper Rylie Amarant.

To achieve the intensity he needed for photos such as the ones of Avery and Rylie, Jay worked with lighting effects both during shooting and later, in post-production. He also used various solutions of glycerin to create the illusion of sweat.

“Water just evaporated under the studio lights, so I needed to use glycerin, but I had to get the right formula.” Jay shakes his head at the memory. “It took a while to get it right. Then, for some of the photos, I used Adobe Light Room in post-production to lighten the eyes.” This last feature can be seen in the Amarant photo.

Jay knows that photography purists object to the post-production manipulation of images, but he disagrees with the purist stance.

“The purist argument is a B.S. argument,” Jay says. “First off, I tend to be on the purist side, but this is the effect I wanted, and photographers have been manipulating photos as long as photography has existed. Ansel Adams was a master at it — look at ‘Moonrise, Hernandez.’ He spent weeks in post-production manipulating the light. The problem with post production is that I see too many bad photos that people think they can fix in Photoshop. A bad photo, without composition or good light, is a bad photo, period. It can’t be made better in post-production.”

In any case, Jay believes that whatever tools a photographer might be interested in using, the goal is always the same. “Art is something we’re drawn to, something we want to look at. I’ve always wished I could paint because painters can just paint their own light. So, as a photographer, I just try to create the best light I can.”

That light, and its relationship to both athleticism and art, is the foundation of “Face of an Athlete.” The exhibit will remain at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center through April.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 3:23 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Local artists captures the Face of the Athlete."