Description
These photographs document one of the most important moments in early women’s Olympic athletics: the controversial women’s high jump competition at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. The event became historically significant after judges ruled against certain jumping techniques used during competition, ultimately awarding the gold medal to Jean Shiley, silver to Babe Didrikson, and bronze to Eva Dawes. Today, Babe Didrikson remains one of the most celebrated female athletes in American sports history, while Jean Shiley and Eva Dawes occupy important places in the early development of international women’s track and field competition. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum architecture visible throughout the group firmly anchors the photographs within the setting of the 1932 Olympics themselves.
What makes the archive especially compelling is its apparent origin as working photographic material rather than ordinary souvenir snapshots. Editorial crop marks, handwritten notations, and the sequence of portraits, action imagery, and groupings suggest these may have originated from a photographer or press archive documenting the events firsthand. The result is a rare surviving visual record from a transformative moment in Olympic history, captured decades before modern sports photography became dominated by mass media spectacle and commercial image production. Material connected to the early Olympic careers of athletes like Babe Didrikson rarely surfaces in such intimate and immediate form.
An exceptional surviving archive from one of the defining moments in early women’s Olympic history.
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