Girl fashion game

Play like a girl: Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? brings women's passion for sports to the fore. - book review

Jane Gottesman's, Game Face: What does a Female Athlete Look Like? (Random House; $35.00) is a photographic celebration of sports and daring physical activities in the lives of girls and women. The book was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smithsonian last June. After a six month run at the Smithsonian, the show traveled to the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, for the 2002 Winter Olympics and is set to continue a five-year national tour.

Game Face is an extraordinary collection of 182 photographs and stories from women sharing how sports shaped their identity. Gottesman searched nearly a decade for these images which span genres--documentary, conceptual, vernacular, sports action--as well as subject, time, place, age and race. The photos depict women participating in every sport from ping-pong to pole-vaulting, from hunting to hardball. They range in style and substance, from sepiatoned portraits of a corseted lady riding a bicycle in the 1890s to full-color action shots of soccer star Brandi Chastain savoring, without inhibition, her team's World Cup victory.

Game Face begins with a foreword by Penny Marshall, whose film, A League of Their Own, about women's professional baseball in the 1940s, identified a groundswell of popular interest in women's sports. "These photos are encouraging and inspiring," writes Marshall in her foreword, "but most of all, they are true." The authenticity portrayed in Game Face also shows women's gains not only in sports but in all aspects of society.

The pictures in Game Face include celebrated sports stars, such as Marion Jones, Chris Evert, Althea Gibson, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Mary Lou Retton, Tara Lipinski and Martina Navratilova alongside dozens of anonymous amateurs. Each image offers a unique answer to the question at the heart of Game Face--What does a female athlete look like? What do girls and women, freed from traditional feminine constraints, look like using their bodies in joyful and empowering ways?

In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, a law mandating equality for women and girls in school. Title IX, born from the optimism of the civil rights and women's liberation movements, continues to have a profound influence on our culture. One of the law's most radical effects was opening the playing fields to girls. In 1971, 1 in 27 school age girls played sports--now, 1 in 2.6 girls do. Not only did more girls start playing sports as a result of Title IX, but these athletes also redefined what is acceptable for girls.

The photographs in Game Face reveal women's powerful and complex relationship to sports. They depict the ways women use athletics to describe their sense of self, physicality, aspirations and involvement in the revision of beliefs about feminine behavior. Using the arc of the athletic experience--getting ready, start, action, finish, aftermath--as its organizing principle, Game Face synthesizes photograph and personal reflections into an elegantly structured story with built-in dramatic movement. In terms of life stages, the various phases of the athletic experience symbolize determination, effort, dedication, completion, satisfaction and reward.

With a combination of images by some of the world's best photojournalists and fine-art photographers, Game Face presents a tremendous mix of perspectives creating a spirited and inclusive debate about the ways women play and compete. Contributors include Annie Leibovitz, Ansel Adams, Mary Ellen Mark, Dorthea Lange, Tina Barney, Lee Friedlander, Justine Kurland, Ruth Orkin, Eve Fowler, Andrea Modica, Charles Harbutt, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pulitzer Prize winners April Saul, Annie Wells, Melissa Farlow and Rick Rickman among many others. Together, these images highlight the photographer's ability to present the beauty and complexity of the women's sports revolution.

A generation of women, including Game Face creator Jane Gottesman, have come of age under Title IX. Old stereotypes about women and sports have diminished--today's women embrace athletics with a passion that would have been unfathomable a quarter of a century ago. Today, sports are an expression of personal freedom for many women. Athletics encourage women to be strong, daring and resilient--necessary survival skills in an era when women are constantly bombarded with images of fashion models, self-improvement products and diets. The influx of women into the athletic arena is forcing a redefinition of sports. More importantly, it is revising traditional notions of womanhood.