This article illustrates the ‘visual turn’ approach to sports history in an analysisof traditionally under-researched material from the late nineteenth century. Focusing on football (‘soccer’) action photography, we argue that interpreting this visual material contributes significantly to the exploration and interpretation of the broader social and cultural context within which sports were practised andthe visual material was produced. Regarding the latter, the photographer’s challenge was to capture the movement inherent in the practice of sports generally and of football specifically. Our analysis explains the time at which these pictures first appear as a consequence of developing possibilities and skills in ongoing photographic experimentation. This is illustrated by a case study of a football action photograph from the archives of the Noorthey Institute for boys in Voorschoten, dating from 1895-1897. There, conducting sports was seen as a way of enhancing the students’ physical and mental strengths, including improved study performance. It took place in an atmosphere of camaraderie among teachers and students, the latter acting as supervisors and teammates at the same time. Beyond the texts, the photographs visualize what this educational approach entailed in actual practice
DOCUMENT
The Netherlands came late to 19th-century industrial revolution but when modernization occurred, it prompted an almost feverish cultural and social 'Anglomania'. Elite youngsters enthusiastically appropriated sports such as cricket and football, which were introduced and promoted by English native speaker teachers at boarding and private schools, and by anglophile teachers and pupils at municipal institutes of secundary education. As a contribution to the study of this process of 'sportfication', this article provides evidence of how at the Noorthey elite Protestant private school physical and mental training not only went hand in hand, but that social, educational and age differences and boundaries between pupils and teachers fell away. By utilizing action photo's and visual archive sources this paper demonstrates that, in addition to research based on texts and numbers, images can be a highly valuable source in sport history research, utterly worthy of critical commentary and independent interpretation.
DOCUMENT
“In-Between” is the title of this conference. If I am right, it focuses on the role of the artist as a middle-man, or middle-woman, between art and learner. It focuses, maybe, on the way artists are capable to transfer knowledge, skills, attitudes, insights, emotions of an artistic nature. And it focuses, maybe, on the way experiences from the domain of the arts may be transferred through the mechanism inherent in the domain of education; two domains which sometimes seem to have a rather problematic relation because the arts are seen as a domain of beauty, of expressivity, of individuality, of freedom, of creativity, whereas education is seen as the domain of standardization, of group work, of compliance to rules, and of mastering the existing.
DOCUMENT
