Neil Leifer

Neil Leifer (born 1942) is an American photographer whose dynamic sports imagery helped define modern sports journalism over a career spanning more than five decades. Raised in New York City, he sold his first photograph—a shot of the New York Giants—at age 16, and by 1960 his work was appearing regularly in major magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Newsweek, Time, and especially Sports Illustrated. He joined Sports Illustrated as a staff photographer before moving to Time magazine in 1978, and in 1988 became a contributing photographer for Life. By the time he left Time Inc. in 1990, Leifer had shot over 200 covers across Sports Illustrated, Time, and People—a record for a single photographer in the company’s history.

Leifer’s iconic images include Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in their 1965 rematch, and crisp, energetic frames from Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups, Kentucky Derbies, World Series contests, the first dozen Super Bowls, and every major heavyweight championship since 1959. He’s captured Ali in over 60 sessions—both in the ring and in intimate studio portraits—and chronicled boxing with such passion that he now considers it the one sport he’ll always shoot.

A 2006 Lucie Award winner for Sports Photography and recipient of the Britton Hadden Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, Leifer has published 16 books, including the seminal Sports (1978) and TASCHEN’s Ballet in the Dirt and Guts and Glory. In recent years he’s expanded into filmmaking and directing, yet still often appears ringside, camera in hand, behind the lens of the world’s biggest fights.