Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like?

The extraordinary collection of photographs and rich personal stories that make up Game Face documents the tremendous impact that sports has on the daily lives of millions of girls and women. On playing fields and street corners, in backyards and gyms, the people in this arresting array of pictures are unselfconsciously exploring the physical and emotional pleasures of competition and play. Each image offers an affirming and satisfying answer to the question at the heart of Game Face: What do girls and women look like, freed from traditional feminine constraints, using their bodies in joyful and empowering ways?

When Title IX was passed in 1972, only one out of twenty-seven school-age girls played sports. Now one in three does. Yet their expanding involvement in sports is still largely overlooked by the media, and as a consequence, millions of young female athletes crave not only role models but an authentic and appealing reflection of their own athleticism. As a young sports journalist, Jane Gottesman was all too aware of this imbalance, and saw the need for a book that honors both our top female athletes and the everyday girls and women whose self-image is strengthened through athletic participation. With the goal of showing America what women's sports looks like, she searched through the work of our country's best photographers, from the newest photojournalists to artists such as Annie Leibovitz and Ansel Adams. The result is Game Face, a unique and inspiring selection of color and black-and-white photographs, a text with first-person accounts by athletes, and an illustrated time line of women's athletic milestones.

Published simultaneously with the opening of an important exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution that will tour for five years, Game Face has been endorsed by the Girl Scouts of the USA, who've developed a Game Face patch, the NCAA, and the YWCA of the USA. An inspiring gift for an athlete of any age, this powerful, timely book takes one of art's most studied subjects the female body and celebrates it in a brand-new way.

Jane Gottesman, Game Face project director and co-curator, was a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, a contributing writer to Women's Sports & Fitness magazine, a writer and associate producer for ABC Sports, and co-editor of the book Play Like a Girl. She lives in Berkeley, California, and New York City.

The Game Face Collection was co-curated by Geoffrey Biddle, a photographer, educator, and author of the book Alphabet City.