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Neil Leifer

USA

Bio

Neil Leifer

Neil Leifer is a living legend — widely regarded as one of the greatest sports photographers of all time. His extraordinary career began in 1960, when he turned professional at just eighteen, and went on to span more than five decades in the service of Time, Life and, above all, Sports Illustrated.

As a teenager growing up in New York, he talked his way into Giants games by volunteering to push wheelchair users down to the edge of the field. He used that privileged vantage point to shoot. He made his first sale to Sports Illustrated at sixteen: the winning touchdown from the 1958 Giants–Colts championship game, still remembered as one of the defining moments in American football. At nineteen, he landed his first cover — the first of more than 200 to come.

What followed was a body of work that reads like a history of modern sport: the great American leagues, the Olympic Games in both summer and winter editions, and the football World Cup. But his defining subject remained Muhammad Ali, whom he photographed more than sixty times — in the ring during the fights that made the boxer a myth, and away from it, in moments of rare intimacy.

His photograph of Ali standing over a fallen Sonny Liston in 1965 is among the most reproduced sports images ever made — a picture that transcended sport to become part of the visual language of the twentieth century.

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