THE COLLEGE

James Startt: Yes, I do. Very much so. My father was a professor at Valparaiso, so I was a faculty brat, but the advantage of that was that we had sabbaticals sometimes. We were over in England one year, and I think it was a Kodak Brownie that my mom had, but we were visiting Cambridge or Oxford and I took my first picture there. I remember that because for years, my mom had two photo albums from our two trips overseas — one from England and one from Ireland — and she had that in there. You know, “Jimmy’s first picture.”

Startt: I was in third grade. So, about nine or ten. I always thought cameras were cool, like bikes or guitars, all the objects that still resonate with me. I went to undergraduate at a small school out east, which is now called McDaniel College. It’s a very small liberal arts college, and one January term they offered photography, which was my first chance to really do it. [A few months before that], I had moved to New York City for the summer, and I was a bicycle messenger, and the first thing that happened to me was that my bicycle got stolen. But my parents’ insurance was very reliable, and it gave me $200, which was just enough for a Canon AE-1. [Laughs] For my whole life, it’s always been between bikes, photography, and music. So anyway, then I had that photography class, and for three or four weeks I was just taking pictures all day and going to the darkroom, and that was my first real hands-on approach to learning what picture-taking was all about. I remember just losing track of time in the darkroom. You know, turning on the Talking Heads and just getting lost. So, I knew that there was some real love there.

Startt: That’s a good question, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer. In terms of sports photography, I’m in the realm of being a photojournalist. And so our primary objective is to capture the moment, and then the best of those pictures will stand the test of time. And I’m aware of that. I’m aware of, say, a shot of a peloton passing through a village, and I know that perhaps that shot will hold up as an epic or timeless Tour de France shot. When I wrote my master’s thesis, I concentrated on a street photographer by the name of William Klein. I was very influenced by him. So, with my initial cycling photography, I was going for [Klein’s] kind of raw emotion — you know, after the finish line, really in-your-face kind of stuff. The whole picturesque element of the Tour de France didn’t really interest me that much. It’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years that I’ve embraced that. I started working with a photo agency that was pushing me to get more shots. They liked what I was doing, but they wanted more of it. And I think that made me a much better photographer. I can still work in the way that I want to work — that Klein-esque way that’s almost like street photography — but I can also get a killer action shot, if I need to. When I’m on a motorbike, I know how to work my driver and anticipate light and movement, and maybe even anticipate an attack so that we’re in position when it happens.

Startt: In the heat of the moment, when someone is jumping into someone else’s arms, they’re not thinking about us. They’re in a zone at that point. That’s what really attracts me to those shots: that zone. There’s that old saying that our eyes are the window to the soul. I mean, think about it: These guys are covered up in glasses and helmets all day long and trying to control their energy and focus their energy for a key moment in the race. But then once the line is crossed, that all comes down. For a couple of minutes, there’s a raw energy there that you don’t find very often. And in those moments, we’re all in this sea of movement and energy and lights and actions and exhaustion and emotion, and I don’t think anybody is really aware of the photographers.

Startt: Most times it’s about losing, isn’t it? Even the best lose most races that they enter.

Startt: It depends. There’s a lot of guys I’ve known who only care about winning, and when they couldn’t win, they were done. They moved onto other things. They quit cycling. A lot of the teams today are focused only on winning. But some teams aren’t. Some teams understand that being there — being in the thick of it, being in the action — is all that matters. For me, it was never about winning, probably because I was never much of a winner. [Laughs] I was one of those consistent guys. I could be a place setter. That sort of thing. So, with my own cycling experience, I’ve always related more to those kinds of guys: the ones who dig deep for somebody else. The ones who are selfless and really sacrifice a lot physically just for the beauty and the love of the sport. I think that plays a role in the pictures I’ve taken over the years. The finish line’s not always about the joy of victory. It’s often about the agony of defeat.

Startt: Right, yeah. It’s sort of a sports journalist credo: The great stories are often told by the losers. Everybody wants the winners’ quote, but those are also the easiest to get. What the loser says is often more telling. When you’re at the finish line, you constantly have to be aware of who placed where and what kinds of emotions are present. In the span of 17 seconds, you can go from the guy jumping into the arms of his teammate to the guy who’s collapsed on the ground crying.

Startt: No. You know, this is not war photography. Everybody is here because of something they love. The suffering that they experience is completely voluntary. This is something that they signed up for, and are proud of, and in the end, they’ll look back on it and feel very proud of themselves, I think.

Startt: I think that photographers are infamous for not liking to be photographed, but I don’t mind. I just don’t get photographed that often.

Startt: Yeah, I think so. Photography forces you to be aware of the superficial. What’s on the surface. Gestures. Little things like that. Taking a picture is often a two-way street. That’s certainly the case with portraits. When I don’t take a good portrait, I’m frustrated firstly with myself, because I wasn’t able to put that person at ease. I wasn’t able to make that person relax. But then sometimes it does work, like with my Lance Armstrong portraits. They’re all black-and-whites. Close-up headshots. One was the cover of his book, and one was taken the night of his last chemo session. I picked him up in a snowstorm from the Indianapolis airport, and took him to the hotel the night before his last session, and I said, ‘Lance, I really want to document this.’ We were pretty close at the time. I had my old Mamiya 330 medium-format camera, and the next day, I did two rolls of 12 right before his last session. And those turned out to be some of his favorite pictures.

Startt: My sports photography certainly has affected my other photography. For one thing, my sports photography is how I got into color. When I was at Indiana, I was learning the rudiments of photography, and we started with black-and-white, for a number of reasons. It’s just the best way to learn all the formal techniques of photography. And then, the photographers that first influenced me were street photographers, not sports photographers. I didn’t come into sports photography from a photojournalist’s standpoint. I came into it from a street photographer’s standpoint. So, I started out in black-and-white, but then when I got into cycling, suddenly I was working in photojournalism, and it became very clear that I needed to do color. That opened me up to a whole other world of picture-taking decisions. All of a sudden, I realized that the color red can unify a picture. You know, there’s a red cap here and a red umbrella there, and suddenly those become formal elements, just like shadows and light. It was my sports photography that got me thinking that way.

Startt: After two or three bodies of street photography, I didn’t quite know where to go after that. Part of it was the constant confrontation of taking pictures with people. All my street photography was done with flash, so there was nothing discreet about the way I was taking pictures. Everybody knew, as soon as that flash went off, that I was taking pictures. Some people would laugh, some people would say, "Hey, why don’t you take a picture of me?" Other people would be like, “Hey, give me that picture. What are you doing?” There’s a constant confrontation in that kind of street photography. You’ve got to be in there. You’ve got to be in people’s faces. So, I think I was looking for other types of photography that were less confrontational, where I could just bask in picture-taking and not have to deal with confrontation.

Startt: And I’d say that the human touch is still there. They’re mostly devoid of people, but they’re places that are inhabited. It’s been really liberating not to think about people and gestures and confrontation, and just go out and find these compositions in very mundane places that I think are extraordinary.

Startt: It’s such a subjective thing, and yet experienced photographers know it. It’s a mastery of all the formal elements of photography — light, balance, color — that create a story within that frame.

Startt: Yeah, storytelling within four walls, and what you can pack into there, and the ways that you can tell that story through the different means of photography. It could be grain. It could be light. It could be whatever. It’s whatever is intriguing to the eye and brings the viewer in and makes them want to stay in that frame. Some pictures are just good pictures for a day, because they’re telling a story of this bike race or this winning move or whatever. And then there are others that you hope are going to be more timeless. Photography has been considered one of the great democratic artforms, because the camera reduces years of technical expertise and training. People that are just getting into it or don’t have a lot of experience can take a great picture, but being able to reproduce that is a different matter. In one of my very first photo classes here at IU, I think it was [Professor Emeritus] Reg Heron who said, “All of you are capable of taking a good picture. But being able to duplicate that time and time again, in different situations, that’s what we’re trying to help you do.” That journey began here for me 30 years ago.