Bill Sumner Interview
SHOOTER ’ S TOUCH
Words : Nick Santora | Images : © NIKE Inc . | Photographer : Bill Sumner
Before the Internet , your bedroom was the only place to look at pictures of sneakers all day long . Today , kids have Instagram . In the 1980s , they had four walls and Scotch tape . Bedrooms became shrines , and walls were covered with posters and magazine clippings of beloved sports heroes . The most important posters of the 1980s were from Nike and channeled the alter-egos of athletes , creating larger-than-life characters reflecting their personalities and playing styles . Peter Moore , the creative genius responsible for inventing this concept , called on a handful of photographers to execute his visions . Bill Sumner shot dozens of legendary posters throughout the decade that still resonate today . We talked about his experience photographing the greatest athletes in the world during an era when sports endorsements were beginning to take on a new look .
How did you get started doing athlete portraits ?
Bill Sumner : The “ Doomsday Defense ” poster for the Dallas Cowboys was the first one I did for Nike . We had a guy in Dallas make the gravestones out of Styrofoam and shot it in the studio . I got a branch and hung it over the top of the set and lit it . We had two 55-gallon drums of dry ice and fans making the low-lying fog . Incidentally , we had to interrupt the shoot because all of a sudden Ed Jones is saying , “ I ’ m really not feeling so good .” Then the other guys started saying , “ Something ’ s wrong here !” It turned out we had displaced all the oxygen in the studio with the carbon dioxide from the dry ice . We had to clear everybody out into the street for a while before we could finish the shoot . The studio was on the outskirts of Dallas , so it didn ’ t cause a big commotion that we had all these football players standing out in the street in uniform . Everyone thought it was funny . That was actually a limited run poster and it ended up being recreated by someone in New York who started selling it . It was originally intended to be a point of purchase thing . It came to Nike ’ s attention that the poster was being sold and they weren ’ t the ones selling it . They caught the guy and sued him . Then they said to themselves , wait a minute , maybe there ’ s something here ? That ’ s how it all started .
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