Phillip Leonian

Advertising photography

In the 1960s and 1970s, Leonian's commercial photography featured in advertisements for household consumer products such as Alka-Seltzer, Tide detergent, Hanes underwear, Purina cat food, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Oneida tableware. 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 commercial 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 with BBDO again 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.

In 1968, AT&T used Leonian's motion photography to illustrate the inconvenience of owning only one telephone. Ads from the company's "Doubleback" campaign depicted women walking across a room or down a flight of stairs before halting and turning back to answer a ringing phone. “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.

In 2025, curator Marvin Heiferman wrote that Leonian's midcentury advertising images "were widely acknowledged by peers in the business," adding that the photos' depictions of forward motion were "reflective of and influential in shaping the aesthetic of the era."

Sports photography

Leonian's fascination with capturing movement in still images led him to sports photography, and over the course of his career, he photographed tennis, speed skating, saber fencing, harness racing, Olympic track cycling, and a variety of other sports.

In 1968, he began working for Sports Illustrated. 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 magazine's May 5, 1969 cover story. Ali spent five days working out 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.”

Seven of Leonian's photos were published on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

One of his most famous sporting images, 1971's Cathy Rigby on Balance Beam, was launched into outer space aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. In their 1978 book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleagues wrote that they selected Leonian's photo for the interstellar time capsule because it depicts the full range of human motion in a single still image:

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.

According to artist Jon Lomberg, the committee member who gathered images for the Golden Record, Rigby's fame played no role in their decision. "We showed her because she was the person who happened to be in that wonderful stroboscopic picture", Lomberg told CNN in 2020. "If it had been an unknown high school gymnast, I would still have sent that picture."

Personal projects

Some of Leonian's first forays into motion photography were studies of people walking, including Walking Man (Man in a Hurry), a 1962 photo of a businessman captured mid-stride. The man's motion-blurred legs "stretch out in an exaggerated stride, creating the illusion that both feet are off the ground", wrote Kristen Gresh, who described the still photo as "almost alive."

Leonian wrote about his early fascination with walking figures in the U.S. Camera Annual: "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 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.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leonian began working with new tools and techniques. According to Gresh, he had his models pose on top of a large turntable, and his experiments with this "rotating stage" led to the Transcendentals, an "otherworldly" series of nudes whose subjects seem to be having "a kind of out-of-body experience."

Like other photographers of the 1970s, he 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.

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 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.

Leonian also shared his expertise by writing various technical guides, such as a primer on how to use fish-eye lenses, as well as an article about his experiments with underwater photography.

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. He also taught at the Olden Photography Workshops and mentored several young photographers individually.

Inventions

According to Popular Photography, Leonian was "always rethinking his methods and his hardware." Throughout his career, he built and retrofitted cameras, tripods, and other custom equipment, claiming that "[i]f a photographer doesn’t invent things, he’s left with just a box and a lens."

Between 1967 and 1968, he designed a stationary strip camera to better photograph motion in still images. Nicknamed "the Cherry Bomb," the bright-red box camera kept its shutter open while long strips of film moved steadily through the apparatus. Each exposure captured a frameless, uninterrupted sequence of motion over time.

Leonian used his Cherry Bomb camera in conjunction with his human-size turntable to create the distinct twisting effect that can be seen in his Transcendentals. According to Gresh, this dual-technique approach also led to the August 12, 1969 cover of Look magazine, which depicted a military man waltzing with a businessman, "their elongated legs twirled together like rubber bands."

By the 1980s, Leonian was designing custom tripods and boom stands. In 1985, former New York Times picture editor John Durniak wrote that “Mr. Leonian has orchestrated tripod manipulation to the point of a fine art.” Shortly thereafter, Leonian set out to design a compact lighting kit. When he realized that his designs would require custom parts, he purchased $30,000 worth of metalworking machinery in order to manufacture a few small connectors. He then tried to make a business of selling homemade equipment out of his studio, which he rebranded “Cougar Design” (a play on his surname).

Leonian 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."