Compared to Norman Rockwell for depicting a slice of life Americana, but the comparison is a but unjust; Ozzie Sweet’s work lacks that element of American disavowal and the subtle and hidden eroticism found in much of Rockwell’s illustration. From another angle, the approach to the individual, more pertinently, his athletic portraits, although a deification of sorts, are not of the Leni Riefenstahl variety; here imperfection and flaw seem subsumed by a larger and timeless narrative on American exceptionalism and the backroads of American manifest destiny…
Ozzie Sweet’s photographs have the gravity and chiseled solidity of great sculpture. According to a 2001 article by John Breneman, Sweet had himself idolized the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument and had begun his own artistic life as a sculptor before turning to photography. His painstakingly composed shots, which earned him praise from Newsweek photo editor Thomas P. Orr as “the Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth of the magazine cover business,” create a sense of heightened, often heroic reality filtering through a moment that in lesser hands would feel stiff, forced, but that in Sweet’s care is natural, graceful, human….
Sweet got his start with posed photos of soldiers during World War II and went on to create portraits of titanic public figures such as Albert Einstein and John Wayne, but his talent found perhaps its greatest and most suitable playground when he turned his lens to the world of sports.Read More:http://cardboardgods.net/2012/03/