Sports Illustrated Slide Show

Book excerpt: If every picture tells a story, every slide tells an even deeper one. Tucked away in Sports Illustrated's photo archive sits 50 years worth of film, a frame-by-frame depiction of the history of sports over the last half a century. The stickers and scribbles along a single slide's border are like tags on a streamer trunk, telling the story of that photo's journey from the playing field to the magazine. This book selects the most colorful of these slides and presents the mounts as objects of art in an oversized 176-page collection, complete with behind-the-scenes vignettes of how the shots came to be. Some slides capture classic SI cover images (Dwight Clark's catch in the 1982 NFC Championship Game or Brandi Chastain ripping her shirt off at the 1999 World Cup) while others are simply great photos (Pete Rose running at full speed or Joe Namath lounging poolside before Super Bowl III). The images themselves are iconic, but by seeing them as slides you get that extra step back. You can see the history that has been made from these flashes of an instant.