Court Supremes
Type 7, Vol4, 2023
“Tennis is so beautiful, but it is always captured the same way—action, action, action,” Los Angeles-based photographer Radka Leitmeritz tells us, having just returned from playing a game herself. “You don’t see the players crying when they lose. You don’t see them destroyed in their hotel room. You don’t see how lonely they are; they lose 99% of the time. You don’t see how hard it is to travel like a circus for ten months of the year. I wanted to show the strength and beauty it takes to be an athlete like this and capture those intimate moments. That is what makes my heart beat.”
Cinematic, elegant and emotional, the images you see here have been part of a project close to the Czech Republic-born fashion and fine art photographer’s heart. They are the result of an accidental thread of passion Leitmeritz pulled on during the pandemic, which has led to her becoming a leading portrait photographer for the Women’s Tennis Association, a collaborative project with Porsche called Court Supremes, and her own upcoming tennis-focused coffee table book, One Love. But the story of how she got there is one of sheer will, passion and determination akin to that of the athletes she photographs.
“I came from a fashion and art background,” says the photogra- pher, who has worked with Vogue, Harper’s BAZAAR, ELLE, Vanity Fair and more. “Everyone thinks I’ve been playing tennis my whole life, but I only started a few years ago. I had a good friend who played, so I signed up for group lessons with her and became completely obsessed. I was so in love with it,” she laughs. “Because I see everything so visually, I started to see all the stories and beauty around tennis, but noticed that so much tennis photography was... not ugly, but very much an action shot. I knew I had to do something.”
Word of Leitmertitz’s side passion got around, and she was commissioned to shoot tennis-related editorials for several magazines, including tennis-themed art and culture quarterly Racquet. Then, on the eve of the pandemic, Leitmeritz applied for a press pass at the Australian Open, where she was given a spot in the press pit and was served her first taste of sports journalism. “I didn’t know anything! I didn’t even know what I was trying to do —I remember just wanting to move around. I was like an extraterrestrial to the photog- raphers and organisers —I dressed differently, I had weird cameras — they were like, ‘Who are you? What do you want? What media outlet are you from? Why should we let you in?’” She laughs again, “I was there as an artist, so I just thought, ‘What can I do differently?’ I wasn’t looking for the action. I’m not there to sell a photograph of the match point. I was looking for the moments in between the action.”
As COVID hit Los Angeles, Leitmeritz retreated with her son to her hometown of Prague, Czech Republic, which, as fate would have it, has one of the highest concentrations of professional female tennis players. “I was in Prague and seeing all these locations, like vintage courts and old tennis clubs. I wanted to do something close to my heart, and I thought maybe I could drive around and shoot some of the Czech players,” She says, excitably, “You don’t understand, there are so many amazing women tennis players there! And with every genera- tion, there is another one behind them of just amazing tennis players! I just thought, let’s get crazy. I approached Porsche with the shoot idea because Porsche is one of the oldest female tennis sponsors, and they loved it!” Eventually, as tournaments returned to travelling, Leitmertiz’s camera followed. She toured with the WTA to document the intimate lives on and off the court of the world’s best tennis players, including Angelique Kerber, Julia Görges, Barbora Strycova, Karolina Muchova, Ons Jabeur, Martina Navratilova, Maria Sakkara, Elina Svitliona and more; and brought a sense of humility, humanity and elegance to how the sport is visually represented.
“I see them more like rock stars,” she says. “I don’t see them as athletes who are just performance machines. They are mentally and physically strong women who work super hard. It was metaphoric for my life as well, because my life as an artist, and their lives as athletes, have a lot of similarities. You travel a lot, you have to perform, and you have to deliver. But also, you must almost reinvent yourself all the time. As an artist, you work all your life, and then you get there and find success. But you can have months or years where you don’t produce your best work, or people just want the new thing. It’s like a musician’s second and third album. You can be winning one year, and then the next, maybe you lose and fall in the rankings and have to find the motivation to come up again. You could have won a Grand Slam two years ago and not even get into tournaments now because you don’t have the ranking for it. It’s crazy. I admire these women so much, and I want to capture this side of it all because you don’t often see their personalities, the women especially.” She smiles, “I would like to achieve something that Annie Leibovitz did when she was touring with the Rolling Stones; that’s been my inspiration.”
Nobody is more shocked at her meteoric rise from the press pit to tour bus than Leitmeritz herself, but it hasn’t been without a fight. “It took me a while to find my way, to not be in the way of the other journalists —mostly all men— and be able to do my thing and show that I deserve to be here.” As it turns out, Leitmeritz’s tennis photography isn’t just a show of athletic determination but artistic pursuit too. “I didn’t have any introduction or contact in the tennis world. My father was not the coach; I wasn’t born into this. I knew nobody. I came literally out of a public court in the park, loving something, into the highest level of tennis. It’s unbelievable when I think about it,” she reflects. “This whole project reminded me, really honestly, that whatever you want to do, if you do it with your heart; really like, with pure love for whatever you do, you can achieve anything. I just really, really loved it, and I guess the people I met saw that in me and loved tennis in the same way.”
Type 7 is a Porsche-powered, Instagram-first digital platform and hardcover annual.
