Muhammad Ali – through the eyes of the photographers who know him best

The unforgettable

Think of a photograph of Muhammad Ali besides those pictured above … I suspect there’s a good chance you thought of that wonderful shot of Ali towering over Sonny Liston in the first round of their heavyweight title fight in 1965, where Ali, visibly irate, is beckoning his opponent up from the canvas with a digger-like swing of his right arm. If not, then you doubtless know the photograph I’m talking about: it’s that famous.

If that wasn’t the first image to spring to mind, then maybe it was the shot of him fooling around with the Beatles in his gym, pretending to land one punch that would knock the Fab Four out like dominoes, or the image of him posed serenely underwater, as if conducting a surreal training session at the foot of a swimming pool. Or maybe it was another? There are, after all, myriad unforgettable photographs of Ali in the archives.

Ali, says Neil Leifer, the man who shot that celebrated photograph of him berating Liston, was “a gift” to anyone with a camera. “I have spent over 50 years of my life shooting photographs. I photographed everybody from the Pope to Charles Manson. But there has never been a better subject than Muhammad Ali,” he says.

“He loved the camera. He always gave you enough time, even when he would start off the conversation by saying ‘listen, I have five minutes, you took too long last time’, 20 minutes later he was still willing. Every time, you came away looking like a star photographer. Through the years, Ali has certainly made a hero out of me.”

30 years too late

Ali’s iconic status – and he is surely a man befitting of that word, iconic – is inextricably married to the photographs that exist of him. While his poetic tongue and rapid wit charmed us, and his poise and ruthlessness in the ring thrilled us, the imagery of him toned our appreciation of his personality, craft and beauty. Photographs are now among the defining symbols by which we remember him.

“I don’t know that photography had any role in shaping his own character, but it definitely has shaped his legacy,” says Leifer. “One of the things about the photographs of Ali – and I say this as a photographer who became a film-maker – is that I always felt and I continue to feel that the still photo has far more impact than any video. Nobody ever talks about the video of Muhammad Ali waving his fist and yelling at Sonny Liston. Same as no one ever talks about the video of the US hockey team beating the Russians. People remember the still pictures, and, in Ali’s case, there are so many great ones.”

Leifer’s career will forever be defined by the two images of his which are most well known. The first, that shot of Liston prostrated on the canvas, was, Leifer often says, a matter of luck. He was in the right place at the right time and did the business he was employed to do, while his Sports Illustrated colleague, Herb Scharfman, watched helplessly from the wrong side of the ring (Scharfman can be seen between Ali’s legs). “It didn’t make a difference how good at photography he was that night, he wasn’t getting the picture.”

True. And yet, in a peculiar sense, Leifer didn’t quite ‘get’ the picture either. Remarkably, his patently perfect shot was overlooked for the front cover of Sports Illustrated by its editors, who favoured a shot of an innocuous Ali jab – not even of the ‘phantom punch’ with which Ali won. Only in 1999, when Sports Illustrated came to review the greatest images of the Century, did Leifer’s classic image finally earn the cover spot it deserved. “It was just about 30 years late, that’s all!”

Four years later, Leifer would receive an accolade from the Observer for another of his images, an aerial shot of Ali celebrating victory over Cleveland Williams in 1966. It was voted the best sports photograph ever taken, beating the Ali-Liston shot into second spot.

“If you ask any photographer ‘what’s your one favourite picture?’, which is an awfully hard question to answer for most people, in my case I have one – this one – and it has always been my favourite,” he says. “For my money it is the best picture I ever took in my life. The pictures on my walls at home are not my photographs; they’re photographs of the great Life photographers over the years, with this one exception. It’s the only picture that has always been up on the walls in my home. I have a large print of it; it’s right in my living room.” Unexpectedly, he adds, “I like to hang it as a diamond shape, with Cleveland Williams at the top.”

In the studio

While Leifer has rightly been feted for capturing some of the brightest moments of Ali’s boxing career, for others the challenge in photographing Ali was not capturing moments, but creating them. Carl Fischer was a photographer at Esquire magazine throughout Ali’s pomp, and the covers featuring Ali which he and the fabled art director George Lois produced in that period remain as arresting as ever. There is one, where Ali is posing in morbid fashion with arrows on his chest – a nod to Andrea del Castagno’s painting The Martyrdom of St Sebastian – which is especially bold. It was designed to signify Ali’s persecution following his refusal to join the US Army for the Vietnam war (he refused on account of his Muslim faith). And yet, this wonderful, politically-freighted photograph was almost never made.

“When Ali realised it was a Christian symbol he wasn’t sure whether to go through with it,” Fischer explains. “So he put in a call to Herbert Muhammad [his manager] in Chicago because he wanted some comfort to know that it was OK. He felt a little guilty, but that call made him feel better. The thing is, people always want their picture on the cover; Ali was the same.”

The production of the shoot was something of a nightmare, as Fischer’s ill-conceived props drooped. “This was done way before computers, so we had to hang a bar above Ali with fishing lines tied to it, and those lines were attached to the arrows to keep them from flopping down. He had to stand perfectly still for a long time. That was the hardest part for him. I was surprised and pleased that he was able and willing to do it. He joked around with the assistants and enjoyed seeing the polaroids – he enjoyed being the centre of attention. He was a delightful fellow. I don’t know how anybody ever had a bad time with him.”

In contrast, Fischer and Lois also shot Liston for another renowned cover, but Liston, perhaps understandably, took much convincing to wear a Santa’s hat and pose as ‘Bad Santa’. “Liston was nothing like Ali. He was cold and nasty and angry and uncooperative. A total pain in the ass,” Fischer says. “Esquire never told anybody what they were going to make them do in the photo-shoot, we just felt once they were there they could be talked into it. But Liston said ‘absolutely not, never’ and it looked like it wouldn’t happen.” A stroke of luck changed the mood. “There was a cute little girl called Donna who was the daughter of the manager. She started wearing the hats, and, to my surprise, he eventually agreed to switch hats and be photographed.”

In both instances, Fischer and Lois had created lean but telling portraits of the two men – Ali as an icon and Liston as a man perceived to be so mean he could even ruin Christmas. “The more you can simplify an idea the better it becomes as a cover,” Fischer explains.

Leifer also spent time with Ali in the studio, and it was there that he came to better appreciate Ali’s true character. “Ali came to the studio with a garment bag full of things,” he says. “First he starts telling me ‘well, I’ve got a bunch of things I’d like to wear’. I said ‘let’s start with the tuxedo’ (which Leifer had planned for Ali to wear), then he says ‘well, I’ve got a new sport jacket I really like’, and who’s going to say ‘no’ to him? After twenty minutes posing in a sports jacket, he then has an African robe and a walking stick that President Mobutu had given him. Then he’s posing in his green dashiki and he says ‘I like the yellow one better’ and takes out another dashiki and this wonderful walking stick. And that’s the way he was. If you let him go, he would just keep coming up with good ideas.”

The Magnum photographer Abbas, who spent time with Ali prior to ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ – of which it is the 40th anniversary – describes it best: “He was like a film-director and we were working for him.”

Bill

One photographer has enjoyed a markedly different relationship with Ali. In 1962, Howard Bingham met the 20-year-old boxer and his brother Rudolph, and offered to show them around Los Angeles in his Dodge Dart. Thereafter, Bingham would shadow Ali the world over and would become Ali’s closest ally. Their friendship has endured beyond all others and Bingham has catalogued the vicissitudes of Ali’s life, taking in excess of half a million photographs in the process.

It was Bingham who spent time with Ali at his home in Louisville and Miami, and captured the shot of him in his Cadillac swamped by local children. It was Bingham who photographed him preaching in Nation of Islam attire. It was Bingham who was there with a camera when Ali ranted at the office of the state prosecutor in Houston in 1967. It was Bingham who documented his travels around Africa, creating the shot of Ali riding a camel beside the Great Pyramids. And it was also Bingham who secretly helped arrange for Ali to carry the Olympic flame at Atlanta in 1996.

The photographer Gordon Parks once said that Bingham had observed Ali “with the sensitivity of a blind man”. “Sometimes it’s hard to see where Ali stops and Howard begins,” wrote Frank Depford in Sports Illustrated in 1998. Indeed, the two men are so close they call one another Bill.

Ultimately, Bingham’s images may not be as treasured aesthetically as many others, but, in their candour and breadth, they are every bit as definitive.

Braggadocio and histrionics

It has often been said that Ali is a man of split character – that his wild-eyed antics were all for show and the second he was out of the limelight and away from the media, he would be calm, reflective and sometimes distinctly shy. For those commissioned to document the champion, Ali’s capricious behaviour made him both a handful and a curiosity.

Stern magazine photographer Thomas Hoepker met Ali on numerous occasions spanning 1960 to 2012, creating a string of notable images, not least the shot of a topless Ali jumping from a bridge in Chicago and another of Ali flicking a jab at the camera – a photograph which somehow looks as though it has been drawn in graphite. When Hoepker photographed Ali in 1966, he was working in tandem with his wife, a Stern magazine reporter. Ali, he says, was more reserved around white women (Ali had converted to the Nation of Islam) requiring the pair to observe their subject from a slight distance. Some days Ali was fun, some days he wouldn’t show at all, and on others he was amusingly pre-occupied.

“We were driving round in the limo one day and he said ‘let’s stop in this bakery, they have wonderful doughnuts’, which was totally against his diet as he was in training for a fight” says Hoepker. “Then a few hours later we were passing this little bakery again and he asks to go in again. That time I got a little suspicious, so I followed him in and found him flirting with the baker’s daughter.” The photograph captures Ali with his guard down, in a very genuine sense. Only eight years later, when Hoepker went to meet Ali at his home, did he discover that Ali and the baker’s daughter, Belinda, had eventually wed.

Similarly, Bob Gomel spent time with Ali in the wake of his first fight with Liston in 1964 and was the only photographer present at the afterparty when Ali revelled with Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam; his photographs depict the intimate bond between the two men at that time in their lives, shortly before the pair became spiritually distanced and Malcolm X was assassinated.

However, his most cherished shot of Ali is a more personal one, taken the following year. Gomel had introduced Ali to his young children and Ali was quick to volunteer for parenting duties. The heavyweight champion of the world even took charge of sterilising the nipple of the baby’s bottle for the youngest child. Later, Ali lifted Gomel’s eldest boy, Corey, on to his knee and Gomel snapped a shot of the pair together – a shot which describes Ali’s personality as acutely as any of him japing with celebrities, running his mouth off, pummelling punchbags, or, for that matter, pummelling opponents’ faces.

“The braggadocio and the histrionics were strictly for show,” says Gomel. “The Ali I knew was a considerate and warm-hearted man. He was the sweetest most caring and decent man, just the opposite of what he appeared like in public.”

Indeed, Gomel’s account seems most irreconcilable with the crude and voluble persona which Ali displayed so frequently in the run up to his fights. Towards Liston and Joe Frazier, Ali had always been merciless – he’d even left a bear-trap on Liston’s front lawn to stoke their rivalry before their first fight.

If Ali’s rivalry with Liston is summarised by Leifer’s image from 1965, then Ali’s great rivalry with Frazier is neatly encapsulated in one photograph by John Shearer. Before their bout in 1971, which became known as The Fight of the Century, Shearer was spending time at Frazier’s training camp in Philadelphia when Ali arrived to taunt his adversary. Shearer spotted trouble and, with it, an opportunity.

“It was kinetic,” he says. “Ali was walking around outside trying to psych Frazier out, but Frazier was this rock. It was like, OK, here we go, this is an image which brings these two guys together.”

In the picture, Ali looks manic as he tries to goad Frazier, while Frazier defiantly stares through the glass and beyond Ali, as if to suggest his opponent scarcely exists. “I certainly couldn’t coax Ali into doing anything, and our mantra [at Life magazine] was always ‘be invisible’, but I think in terms of publicly-managing the image, Ali was in control. You can see it in his eyes. And as soon as it started happening I knew this could really work.”

‘Sooo pretty’

Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s doctor and friend, once said of him: “If God sat down to create the perfect body for a fighter, anatomically and physiologically, he’d have created Ali”. Certainly, Ali was never shy about proclaiming his own beauty – “I’m sooo pretty” was one of his most popular refrains. In David Remnick’s thorough account of Ali’s early life and nascent career, Remnick couples Ali’s awareness of his own image – not to mention his outrageous behaviour – with that of the effeminate wrestler, Gorgeous George, whom he admired. In short, Ali knew the value in looking good for the cameras.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, he was photogenic all right,” says Shearer. “He had that sense of pride, he carried himself well and he was self-aware even in casual moments. It’s funny, he fought with his hands practically in his pockets and yet he was unblemished.”

In one of Leifer’s less vaunted photographs, Ali can be seen arcing sideways at the hips to inspect himself in a shoulder-high mirror, captivated by his own image. You might wonder, then, to what extent Ali must treasure the photographs that have been taken of him.

Typically, and rather fittingly, Ali is flippant when the subject is discussed. “Ali has never had a conversation with me where he’s dwelled on any particular picture,” says Leifer. “I have sat with him in an exhibition where he was guest of honour. He would put his arm around me and tell me how the Ali v Liston picture is the greatest picture ever taken of him, and five minutes later he’d have his arm around Howard Bingham pointing to some picture and saying ‘Howard, that’s the best picture that’s ever been taken of me’.”

• Check out our gallery featuring 25 of the best Ali photographs ever taken, as selected by Jonny Weeks