Michael Zagaris: Capturing the Game
Few photographers can truly capture the drama, joy, and sheer intensity that every player experiences on the field. Michael Zagaris is one of the few, a pro photographer who has built his career on an almost psychic ability to empathize with players. His photographs reflect locker-room life and expose the emotion that’s usually hidden behind helmets. Zagaris is a behind-the-scenes sports photographer, a true biographer of the game.
“I’ve always used the camera as an entrée to live the lifestyle of the subject that I’m photographing,” he says. “You become who you’re shooting. If I’m shooting football, I’m the player. I’m on the team. When I go in on game day, I undress in the locker room; I tape my feet up, put on my gear. When I go out on the field, I become invisible.”
Zagaris is the team photographer for the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Athletics. He tracks both teams during their respective seasons, capturing action and emotion on the field and the diamond. He slings two digital SLRs and during a typical game he’ll fire off between 600 and 1,000 frames. Until recently, most of those shots were buried deep within the recesses of massive external hard drives, untagged and nearly impossible to retrieve. “I might as well have thrown the hard drives overboard into the Atlantic,” says Zagaris. “How do I access it all? I had to go through page by page. It would take me hours and I only found some of the pictures I was looking for.” Now the photographer uses Aperture to archive all his shots. “Now I can pull stuff up instantaneously,” he says. “It makes my life so much easier and I have more time to take pictures.”
Running for Office
Zagaris was going to be president. Of the United States. And it wasn’t the naïve dream of an over-achieving high school student. “I had it all planned out,” he says. “I was going to play football in high school, go to college on a football scholarship, play football in the NFL, run for Congress, then for Senate and then for the presidency.” Zagaris pursued his plan with a fanatic, single-minded determination. He won the football scholarship and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He had a tryout for the Baltimore Colts. He worked on local and national campaigns. He even attended law school.
Then the plan started to go awry. A mid-season injury crushed his pro football hopes and in 1968 he was entangled in one of the nation’s bloodiest political events. “I was right there, behind Robert Kennedy, when he was shot,” says Zagaris. “That really did it for me. The country really changed after that and I didn’t want to have anything to do with politics.”
The presidential hopeful did what any of us would do — he turned to rock-and-roll. Zagaris fled to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he taught elementary school and studied the British Invasion. “I kept seeing all these British musicians reworking American blues songs,” he says. “So I started working on a book about English rock-and-roll.” He interviewed the likes of Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, and Mick Jagger. He took snapshots throughout his interviews, freezing his moments with the stars for posterity. The stars were impressed with his work, so much so that they offered to purchase some photos. Soon Zagaris was whisked away on world tours as a band photographer. His intimate behind-the-scene shots earned him fame and a spot among rock-and-roll’s top photographers.
“I was in the band,” he says. “You’re backstage, you’re putting makeup on with them, and you are the band. I wanted to do lifestyle, take people back and show them what it’s really like to be in a band.”
On the Field
Even rock stars grow weary of touring and after a few years of partying with superstars, Zagaris was ready to move on. He returned to the gridiron — this time with camera in hand — and wrangled a gig as the 49ers’ staff photographer. It’s not as easy as it sounds. “I called and told them that I was with a magazine, ‘Football’s Best,’ and that I wanted to shoot the training camp,” says Zagaris. “They gave me credentials and let me onto the field.” The photographer basically hung around taking pictures for about a year until the team realized that it needed a staff photographer. Today Zagaris follows the team around the country to capture each game.
Zagaris prepares for the game with the steely concentration of a battle-hardened linebacker, donning player’s garb and psyching himself up for the game. It’s all part of getting into the players’ heads. “I just take it all in, like I was one of them,” he says. The photographer erupts onto the field with the players, trailing them with camera equipment. He’s usually strapped with three cameras, two digital SLRs and an old film camera body that holds a third lens. His kit is relatively simple — a 16-35mm wide angle zoom, a 70-200mm telephoto zoom, and a 400mm f/2.8 telephoto.
During the course of a game, Zagaris will fire off between 600 and 1,000 shots. His goal is to put his audience in shoulder pads, make them taste the rubber of a bite guard. “It’s my job to make you feel like you were there,” he says. After the game, he spends a few hours sifting through them to get to the gems that will eventually end up in magazines and galleries across the country.
