Sweet, Ozzie

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Ozzie Sweet is “the Babe Ruth of photographers,” says Chuck Solomon, himself a top photographer for Sports Illustrated. It’s a fitting comparison, because Sweet has tallied a Ruthian number of magazine cover credits: nearly 1,800 in a dizzying variety of fields. He’s most famous, of course, for his timeless work for Sport magazine: He created the bulk of that publication’s covers between 1949 and the early 1960s.

It was during his long Sport stint that Sweet developed and perfected his trademark style, from those warm, smiling portraits to his distinctive “simulated action” photographs of the day’s top athletes. Sport so valued Sweet’s productions that the magazine often put his credit line right on the cover.

But Sweet has applied his magic touch to far more areas than sports. In the mid-1940s, before joining Sport, he took dozens of covers shots for Newsweek, capturing timeless portraits of such personalities as Albert Einstein and Ingrid Bergman. In the decades that followed, Sweet’s work would grace the covers of top news and general-interest magazines (Time and Saturday Evening Post, for example); hunting and fishing magazines (Field & Stream, Sports Afield); women’s magazines (Cosmopolitan, Family Circle); children’s magazines (Boys’ Life, Young Miss); hobby magazines (Modern Photography, Tuff Stuff); and a seemingly endless list of others.

It wasn’t uncommon for newsstands of the 1950s to carry -- at the same time -- more than a dozen publications bearing Sweet covers. His secrets: perfect technique, discipline, imagination, and -- perhaps most important -- a personality that “could charm the birds out of trees,” as one of his editors wrote.

Ozzie Sweet, born in 1918 and raised in upstate New York, was headed down the path of acting as a young man, appearing in a number of movies, including Reap the Wild Wind, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. World War II derailed Sweet’s acting career, but not his enthusiasm for photography. He spent five years in military service but he used that time to hone his photographic skills.

After scoring cover photos on military publications in the early 1940s, Sweet began submitting work to national publications. Among them was Newsweek, whose publisher was impressed enough to hire Ozzie as a staff photographer in 1945. By 1948, he decided to go out on his own. Sport became his “bread and butter,” Sweet says, “but I was a freelancer, and I wanted to do covers for as many different magazines as possible. I wanted to be a cover expert.”

That’s exactly what he became, working at a dizzying pace for decades. He didn’t stop with magazines, either. Sweet has dozens of book covers to his credit, including several sports titles in the 1950s and 1960s and a series of 18 wildlife books in the 1970s and 1980s. The cover of Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book The Greatest Generation is another Sweet classic.

Sweet also has tackled hundreds of advertising jobs for car manufacturers, travel and tourism guides, and calendars. His images have appeared on album covers and catalog covers, and on a 60-foot-wide “Colorama” photo at Grand Central Station. The Maxwell Davidson Gallery in New York and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown are among the institutions that have displayed his work. In 2001, Vanity Fair honored him as one of “Photography’s Grand Masters.”

Sweet remains active as a photographer well into his 80s. He continues to fill a half-dozen calendars every year with his photographs of vintage cars, antique tractors, cats and kittens, and dogs and puppies. Ozzie has even returned to the diamond. An entire chapter in his book The Boys of Spring (Sport Media Group, 2005) is devoted to spring training photographs he took in 2003 and 2004. The Boys of Spring is the third collection of Sweet’s sports photographs to show up in book form, following 1998’s Mickey Mantle: The Yankee Years and 1991’s Legends of the Field.

Yes, Ozzie Sweet is the Babe Ruth of sports photographers, having changed that field just as Ruth’s titanic (and frequent) home runs changed baseball. But in his non-sports photographic endeavors, he often draws comparisons to Norman Rockwell: His style has the same type of innocence, humor, and humanness.

Comparisons to Rockwell greatly flatter Ozzie, even if he doesn’t quite feel worthy. Anyone who loves photography, who appreciates art, and who enjoys a smile, however, knows that he is.


Larry Canale©2005