‘Athletic nonsense’: how photographer Pelle Cass creates an alternative vision of sport

The other day, during a football match in which my eight-year-old son was playing, I watched several notable things happen almost all at once.

First, a ball struck one of my son’s teammates in the face and the boy flopped to the floor clutching his nose.

A second boy, this one from the opposing team, also fell to the ground – he had been running backwards and tripped.

And a third boy, one of my son’s friends, loosed the rolling ball as hard as he could into the referee’s stomach, forcing the referee to double over. He, too, then hit the floor.

This kind of sequence of events is not uncommon in children’s football, which is what I love so much about it: no action is predetermined, no outcome foretold.

Most of my son’s matches are a mania. One moment you’ll watch a tiny eight-year-old score a magical free kick from 25 yards and, almost immediately afterwards, you’ll watch two boys and the ref drop to the patchy grass in a kind of cosmic union.

Everything can and will happen all at the same time.

ICA Roof Diving,  Boston, Massachusetts, 2024. Over one hour and four minutes 1,829 photos were taken, arranged in 694 layers

As I watched this particular scene play out, I was reminded – as I am almost every time I watch my son play football – of the work of Pelle Cass, a photographer based in Boston who over the past several years has conjured pictures that combine multiple sporting actions into single images.

See the photographs on this page: of a water polo game that includes almost all of the match’s actions; of a football game in which countless players compete for countless balls; of a high dive competition in which contestants are shown to dive all at once.

The effect of looking at Cass’s images is uncanny: you understand these things can’t have happened at the same time – that there is a technical trickery going on – and yet you also know that all of what has been photographed has happened, at some moment or another.

His photographs capture split seconds now consigned to history while being suggestive of actions that are yet to come.

Cass was born in 1954 in New York and brought up in Massachusetts by an artist mother. (His father was in the army.) As a child he recalls visiting MoMA, where he encountered the tumult of Eugene Delacroix and Jackson Pollock.

For a while he made a living as a street photographer, but “the work tended to be still and a little spooky,” he told me recently, and he yearned for chaos. “When a kid ran into the frame or a bird swooped down or a dog started jumping around, I got kind of excited,” he said.

In 2015, a magazine asked him to photograph an NBA game, where he trialled a multi-photo approach. Later he and his wife visited Harvard Stadium, where an American football match was playing out, and he positioned “my little walk-around camera on a wall high in the bleachers, set the timer to repeat, and that was it”.

He began going to university sports events more regularly and soon he took to taking sports pictures full time.

Cass is only a moderate sports fan. “I like to watch basketball and tennis sometimes,” he says, “but I’d rather be playing.”

The photographs capture this preference for taking part. It is unclear in his pictures who is winning or losing, and it doesn’t seem to matter either way. What does matter are the many individual actions colliding into what Cass calls an “athletic nonsense” – a nonsense that seems more true to life than singular images.

When we recall sporting events, it is not often a solitary action that comes to mind but instead a collage of activity, a frenzied chaos. Like eight-year-olds falling over in the park.