Phillip Marshall Leonian (January 13, 1927 – September 15, 2016) was an American commercial photographer known for his images of people and objects in motion. Active from the 1950s through the 1980s, he used stroboscopic effects and motion blur to capture movement within a single frame. His multi-image photography has been compared to the works of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.
Leonian specialized in advertising and editorial photography, and his work appeared in numerous ads and magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and Time. In the 1960s and 1970s, he contributed regularly to Sports Illustrated, producing cover photos of famous athletes such as Muhammad Ali and basketball player Earl “the Pearl” Monroe. Leonian's subjects also included figure skater Janet Lynn, long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, and Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby. His 1971 photo of Rigby's balance beam routine was one of the 116 images encoded on the Voyager Golden Record.
Leonian lectured and wrote extensively on copyright, advising fellow photographers on how to retain the rights to their work. He was also an inventor who held two patents for photographic equipment.
Early life Leonian was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia. His Armenian-born father, Leon H. Leonian (1888 – 1945), was a mycologist and professor of mycology at West Virginia University. An obituary published in Science said that Leon Leonian "established an international reputation in three distinct fields of science—plant diseases, the physiology of fungi, and plant breeding." Phil's mother, Nell, taught in the university's English department.
Leonian first took up photography while he was a student at Morgantown High School, where, as a senior, he was voted "most lazy". After graduation from high school, he served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Occupation of Japan. From 1947 to 1950, he attended West Virginia University, where he studied biology and chemistry. Though he never graduated, his training in the scientific method led to a lifelong fascination with experimentation, which had a major influence on his photography. (According to Popular Photography, Leonian was "always rethinking his methods and his hardware.")
After leaving WVU, Leonian studied at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. Years later, WVU's quarterly magazine referred to him as "one of the University’s more noted dropouts."
Career After graduating from the Brooks Institute, Leonian moved to New York City, where he found a job at a color photo lab—one of the few operating in the city at that time. Working at the color lab allowed him to learn firsthand from the work of New York's pro photographers.
Leonian got his start as a commercial photographer by doing medical reportage for Physicians News Service in the mid-1950s. His black-and-white portraits of people with chronic illness appeared in medical journal ads.
By the 1970s, he had developed a reputation as one of New York City's most in-demand advertising photographers, one who could command fees as high as $2,000 a day. “He makes top bucks because he is the best there is at showing people and objects in motion", wrote Norman Schreiber in The Village Voice.
Leonian's photos were published in more than a dozen magazines, including Time, Newsweek, Essence, Look, Sports Illustrated, and World Tennis. His work also appeared in vintage photography magazines such as Popular Photography, Camera 35, Travel & Camera, and U.S. Camera and Travel (which later became Travel + Leisure).
Advertising photography In the 1960s and 1970s, Leonian's photos appeared in ads promoting all kinds of products: Alka-Seltzer, Tide detergent, Hanes underwear, Purina cat food, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Oneida tableware, the Yellow Pages, etc. His corporate clients also included AT&T, IBM, Kodak, Pepsi-Cola, Sears, Citibank, Bayer, Avis, Honeywell, Jockey, General Foods, General Motors, and General Electric.
Leonian's breakthrough came in 1964, when he worked with BBDO on a series of ads for the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. His motion-blurred photos of galloping racehorses were posted in subway stations across New York City and seen by millions of commuters.
Working on another BBDO campaign in 1966, Leonian used remote-controlled cameras to capture the chromatic fidelity of a Philco color TV set. His untouched photos were then reproduced in ads that ran in Life, Look, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and TV Guide.
Two years later, AT&T used Leonian's signature motion photography to illustrate the inconvenience of owning only one telephone. Ads from the company's "Doubleback" campaign depicted women walking—across a room, down a flight of stairs—then halting and doubling back the way they came after hearing the phone ring. “It was a matter of slicing time, a fourth dimension of space, and effectively recreating it on two dimensions of paper”, wrote the creative team at N.W. Ayer.
Sports photography Leonian began working with Sports Illustrated in 1968. His first assignment—shooting an Olympic pentathlon—allowed him to play around with new tools and techniques, including the multiple-image effects that would become his Sports Illustrated trademark.
Within a year, he was photographing Muhammad Ali, who posed in a king's robe and crown for the May 5, 1969 cover story. Ali spent five days in Leonian's studio. He even sparred a bit with the photographer, who claimed to have been the first to observe some of the boxer's habits. “For example, he will not blink his eyes when the other fighter is in range,” Leonian said. “If he has to blink, he steps back. It was a totally unconscious thing with him.”
Personal projects Some of Leonian's first forays into motion photography were studies of people walking, including Walking Man (Man in a Hurry), a motion-blurred 1962 photo of a businessman captured mid-stride.
Writing in the 1977 edition of U.S. Camera Annual, Leonian reflected on his early fascination with walking figures: "Walking is one of the basic human postures, the others being standing, sitting, and lying down. The last three are standard subjects throughout art history. Why not walking?" He went on to connect his multi-image photos of people walking to some of the earliest artwork made by humans:One day, leafing through a book, I came across reproductions of paintings of cave walls in France. An artist wanting to represent an animal in motion drew it with many legs. My ‘original’ image had been invented by a Neanderthal. My elation was profound…I had tapped a primal way of seeing.Leonian's experiments with motion blur led to the Transcendentals, an early-1970s series of nudes which made it appear as though his subjects' spirits or souls were leaving their bodies.
Like other photographers of the 1970s, Leonian also played around with Polaroids, resulting in a series of portraits called Waterworks. Using SX-70 film, he snapped pictures of his friends from the New York photography community, capturing a different body part (an arm, a leg, a face, etc.) with each instant photo. He then used a chemical solution to separate the emulsions from their backings, placed the emulsions on photo paper, and carefully arranged them to create full-figured portraits. The New York Times called the resulting caricatures "fascinating", noting that "the curious effect of each is that of a person floating in his own body baggie filled with water."
Reception In May 1969, the editors of Travel & Camera suggested that Leonian was shaking up the field of sports photography: “For years, sports photography has been as predictable as Old Faithful. But things are changing, and Phil Leonian is in good part responsible."
In 1972, the New York Times photography critic Gene Thornton called Leonian's photos of athletes and dancers “truly strange and haunting” in his review of an exhibition called Sports in Time/Space. Thornton went on to elaborate:In some of his non-strobe pictures he achieves a kind of cubist effect with several successive views of the same figure in motion. See particularly the bicycle racers. But the strangest and most interesting results occur when he holds his camera steady on a figure in motion. The background goes streaky and blurry and the moving legs of a horse are as many and filmy as the legs of a centipede.Astronomer Carl Sagan, who led the NASA committee in charge of curating the Voyager Golden Record, approved the use of one of Leonian's stroboscopic photos of gymnast Cathy Rigby for the interstellar time capsule. In their 1978 book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Sagan and his colleagues wrote that they had selected Leonian's multi-image photo because it managed to depict the full range of human motion:If this had been the only picture of a human being we sent, what a strange image of us recipients might have! But it should be clear that this is one person in movement, and it probably gives a better sense of how we move than anything else could have.In 1986, former Sports Illustrated picture editor Tom Vanderschmidt likewise praised Leonian's motion photography:Phil Leonian brings the excitement of a sport into a still picture. He brings the movement, feeling and noise of it to the magazine page. There have been no pictures of gymnasts equal to what Phil did 15 years ago. His ice-skating pictures are special. For the first time, people could see what was going on. The positions, where the skater’s head and feet were: It was all laid out.
Writing From 1957 through 1963, Leonian wrote a regular column for Camera 35, a vintage magazine devoted to 35mm photography. The column ("Comments on Color") drew upon his experiences developing photos in a color lab. He remained a contributing editor until 1977.
Over the years, he continued to share his expertise by writing for various other photography publications. For example, he wrote a primer on how to use fish-eye lenses, which ran in U.S. Camera and Travel, as well as an article about his experiments with underwater photography, which was published in Travel & Camera.
Teaching In the mid-’70s, Leonian taught photography classes at the newly formed International Center of Photography, where he was reportedly one of the more popular instructors.
Inventions Throughout his career, Leonian tinkered with cameras, tripods, and other photographic equipment. "If a photographer doesn’t invent things," he told Popular Photography, "he’s left with just a box and a lens."
In 1985, former New York Times picture editor John Durniak mused that “Mr. Leonian has orchestrated tripod manipulation to the point of a fine art.” A few years later, Leonian set out to design a compact lighting kit that would fit inside a 30-inch tripod bag. When he realized that his designs would require custom parts, he purchased $30,000 worth of metalworking machinery—all to manufacture a few small connectors.
He then tried to make a business of selling his homemade equipment out of his studio, which he rebranded “Cougar Design” (a play on his surname). He freely shared his inventions with his photographer friends. "My only parameters", he said, "are that new items help me and photographers do better work, and that I have some fun making them."
Influences When asked about his idols, Leonian named photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. "To me, Eugene Smith is still the greatest photographer in the whole world", he told an interviewer in 1972. "He’s the only hero who’s held up. Everybody else seems to get tired."
Copyright advocacy