Longevity Rituals of Six Pro-Athletes for a Portfolio for the New York Times Magazine

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I spent most of April on a plane, zigzagging between New York, Nashville, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Dallas, photographing a portfolio for the New York Times Magazine Health and Longevity issue. My subjects were six professional athletes still at the top of their game in their late thirties and forties, redefining a sports culture that long treated thirty as the beginning of physical decline. A high-tech ecosystem of recovery methods and new approaches to diet, fitness, and lifestyle have pushed the ceiling into territory that, a decade ago, would have sounded like science fiction.

Every athlete in the story represents a different sport, so the training and recovery methods varied from person to person. I visited a hockey rink with Hilary Knight and accompanied W.N.B.A. forward Alysha Clark to a basketball practice, cryo, and red light therapy. I photographed Elana Meyers Taylor, who is the oldest woman ever to win an individual gold at the Winter Olympics this past February, and in monobob, one of the most punishing of all the bobs. The sport demands superhuman strength since it is a single-person event in which the athlete does everything herself; sprinting the start, driving, and braking. In Dallas, Atlanta Falcons Nick Folk practiced kicking before exercising in his garage gym, while Texas Rangers outfielder Andrew McCutchen visualized the game in a hotel mirror after an intense workout. Lindsey Vonn was also part of the story, but because of a recent injury, she could only sit for a studio portrait.

I shaped the feature around two existential narratives that became the spine of the story: dystopian-tinged sci-fi sprinkled with religious exaltation. Together, they pulled the work into a surreal dimension where Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth is refracted through the high-tech futurism of longevity interventions, one baby step closer to the myth of eternal life.

TRAINING

Both Nick and Elana showed me Sisyphus-esque training exercises that require a silly amount of strength. While Nick practices in the privacy of his backyard, Elana pushes her family’s SUV down the street, a sight sure to delight the neighbors of an otherwise ordinary residential block. I wanted her photos to communicate the quirkiness of this method, but capturing it was an ordeal of its own.

Sometimes I know exactly what angle, distance, and framing will infuse a photo with meaning, but in this instance, I was unsure how best to compose the shot to give the photos both intensity and context. I problem-solve situations like this by shooting as many angles as possible and let the answer come through in the edits. I tried everything: verticals, horizontals, stepping back to see the whole SUV, stepping in to just get Elana’s face, creating a reflection of her face in the bumper, shooting from high, and then lying on the ground. Lighting was an issue at first, with Elana’s face staying in shadow, which was solved by placing one strobe in the back seat of the SUV, right up against the window, and a second strobe held by my assistant on the side.

I thought the graphic reflection would make the edit, but a horizontal photo giving more context to the size of the SUV and showing the residential street with Noah running in the background got chosen instead. I tend to get hung up on details, and in this photo, the two crosses on the houses echo the religious exaltation that’s the glue holding the portfolio together.

WORKOUTS

Every athlete on the list trains with weights, and almost all of them agreed to be photographed doing it. The tricky part was finding new angles in identical-looking gyms with identical equipment. After much experimenting, my favorite ended up being Andrew’s portrait between the massive dumbbells, a difficult shot that required manual focus and fast framing.

The one photo I wish had made the edit was Elana lifting weights with Noah hanging on the bar behind her. I understand why it was redundant in the story, but sometimes an edit feels like a guillotine, chopping away favorite images for the sake of a coherent narrative.