Photographer Heinz Kluetmeier is perhaps best known for his more than 100 Sports Illustrated cover photos, including an iconic shot of the 1980 'Miracle on Ice' US Olympic hockey upset over the Soviet Union and the 2008 underwater photo that proved Michael Phelps’ seventh gold medal finish.
But to many, Kluetmeier was also considered a pioneer in the technology behind those iconic sports images, after becoming the first to experiment with underwater cameras during swimming competitions.
Kluetmeier, a sports photographer who spent more than 30 years of his career with Sports Illustrated, died aged 82 on January 14 after a fight with Parkinson’s disease, according to his family.
Kluetmeier worked as a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated from 1979-2009, including the title of director of photography, and continued contributing until 2016. He was known for his photographs of iconic moments in sports history. But Kluetmeier was also the first to apply a number of different technologies to the field of sports photography in his career that spanned 50 years from film to the digital heyday.
During the world swimming championships in 1991, he experimented with an underwater camera – making him the first to bring underwater camera technology to the world of sports photography. The following year, he was the first to use an underwater camera to photograph the Olympics in Barcelona.
Kluetmeier continued to integrate underwater photography into his career for decades. In 2008 he captured an iconic image that proved Michael Phelps win in the 100m butterfly, an underwater shot looking up as Phelp’s fingers bent with the impact on the wall just as the second place swimmer’s fingers touched. He was inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame in 2017, the only photographer to receive the honor so far.
But the technology behind the 2008 Phelps shot was perhaps almost just as iconic. That year, Kluetmeier worked with his assistant Jeff Kavanaugh to create an underwater camera setup that was tethered, automatically sending the images to a computer above the water. The technology is a key example of how the industry changed throughout Kluetmeier’s career, as the photographer actually earned his pilot's license and flew his own film rolls back to the office in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Sports Illustrated.
In addition to his pioneering work in underwater sports photography, Kluetmeier is also considered the first photographer to use strobes at an indoor football game during the 1981 Sugar Bowl.
Photography changed drastically from the time that Kluetmeier was 15, photographing the Green Bay Packers, until his retirement in 2016. At those first NFL games, the young photographer used a Nikon S. Kluetmeier’s own personal list of his favorite photos would later be heavily dominated by the Canon EOS-1DS Mark II, along with the Canon EOS-1V film camera.
While Kluetmeier had many technical firsts during his career, the photographer was once quoted as calling the technical stuff irrelevant. “I think that technique and technical stuff is absolutely irrelevant to the picture in terms of what you do as a photographer,” he said. “I think the most important thing is to have a vision, to have an emotional feeling, to care about what you’re photographing, and to have something that’s already there in your heart, in your eye.”
Kluetmeier arguably owes much of his start to his parents, who immigrated to the US from Germany when he was nine years old. His mother worked for the Associated Press, and one of her pictures of him at age 13 is said to have sparked his interest in photography. His father encouraged him to study engineering in college, dubious of the stability of a career as a photographer, a background that would help Kluetmeier later modify his underwater cameras.
Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim remembered the photographer as an athlete who would take risks with his photos. “There are no hard, fast rules about making it in America. But when you have a portfolio featuring Vince Lombardi and John F Kennedy before you’re old enough to drink one of Milwaukee’s Finest, you’ve done well finding a sense of place,” Werthiem wrote.
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