Images of Alice Coachman and Althea Gibson
Alice Coachman and Althea Gibson were headlining sports pages during the 1940s and 1950s. So while we might expect there to be a wealth of images of the two athletes, this is not necessarily the case. One of the ways in which we learn about race and gender through Coachman's and Gibson's story is in the area of images.
The white press of the 1940s, focusing more on gender than race in their coverage, left us few images of any female track and field athlete. The main reason for this was that track and field was considered a sport for men. The sports pages of both black and white newspapers contained many photographs of male track athletes. But the sports coverage of the “unfeminine” women who participated in track and field were not generally accompanied by photographs. In fact, even when Coachman became the first African American woman to win Olympic gold, her picture did not appear in most white newspapers.1 Black newspapers chose to highlight race over gender, however. So pictures of Coachman and her Tuskegee Institute teammates appeared often in the press.
Althea Gibson's image story is different, mainly because she participated in a sport that had been accepting of women for over fifty years. As such, women tennis stars were photographed by both the black and white press.
Of course, there are other sources for images of these athletes, such as personal papers and school publications. But the ways in which the black and white press of the 40s and 50s handled not only the print but also the images of these athletes teaches us something about the way race and gender went into creating them as public figures. The following discussion, however, analyzes some of the images that do exist for their usability to enhance a teaching website, and shows how Adobe Photoshop Elements can help transform the images to make them more suitable for such a purpose.
The image to the right is a photograph of Alice Coachman (center) beating out
one of her fiercest rivals, Stella Walsh (pictured left), in the mid-1940s. I
acquired the photograph from a google web search.2 My
main goal with this image was to provide some contrast between the foreground
and the background in order to place emphasis on the athletes. First, however,
I used the Photoshop crop tool to remove the writing at
the bottom, since the emphasis in my work is on Coachman, not Walsh. Moreover,
the green writing draws the eye away from the image itself. Second, I used the
unsharp mask tool in Photoshop Elements to sharpen the features of the runners
in the foreground. In conjunction with that effort, I also used the clone stamp
tool to remove some of the white glare on Walsh's clothing, and to define her
face and neck a little better. The main work on this image, however, was in colorizing
the building, trees, and sky in the background with the paint brush to provide
much needed contrast for the runners to stand out better. I also used the paint
brush to remove the onlookers who would have been difficult to colorize and who,
in black and white, detracted from the contrast I was trying to achieve.
Finally, I also added
emphasis to the finish line, which was barely visible in the original.
At this point in the process, the image looked much better, but I was still
not satified with the result. The contrast between the background and foreground
was now too great. My next step was to add color to the center of the track
and to the athletes’ clothing.
All of the colorizing was done using the paintbrush tool. 
Although this was
a bit tedious, I was able to add more texture this way. Also, magnifying the
image to 200% made the work easier to accomplish. The
last step involved using the clone stamp and sharpen tools to clean up the
arms and legs of the runners so that they didn't look so “dirty,” and
appearance that had been emphasized when I colored the clothing.
The result, which
appears to the left, shows how the contrast between color and black and
white helps the athletes stand out from the background.
The next photograph I worked with came from the Tuskegee University archives and is a picture of Coachman with the 1941 Tuskegee Tigerette national championship track and field team. I scanned the image in from a copy of the photograph that was given to me last year while researching Coachman at the Tuskegee Archives.3 My copy was sickly yellowed, so my main objective was to abstract the image and mat it to a different background so as to bring out the black and white texture of the photograph. First, however, I needed to resize the image so that it was manageable in terms of file size.
I scanned the image in as a jpeg. The original resolution was 150 pixels/inch, and the size 1206 x 866 pixels. My first step was to change the resolution to 72 pixels/inch to make it appropriate for web use. Since I did not want to retain the previous size, I let Photoshop automatically resize the image for me with the resolution change. This brought the image down to 579 x 416 pixels. This version of the image is pictured below.
After resizing the image, I decided to crop out the coach's son, who, darling though he is, detracted from the setting and emphasis of the image. Moreover, the cropping also served to reduce the image size further. Next, I used the autocolor tool to let Photoshop work on improving the color. Still desiring more improvement, I adjusted the brightness and contrast, which helped return the image to a truer black and white quality. Now I was ready to mat the image to a different color background. I chose a color background, again, to provide contrast to the people in the foreground, and to allow me to continue to fine tune the facial features of the athletes. Mostly, this involved eliminating white spots and emphasizing hair color in certain places, which I did with the use of the clone tool stamp. Once I had brought out the facial features of the athletes, however, I found the constrast between the rose colored background I selected and the black and white too great. So I decided to tone the color down by applying the “colorful center” effect in Photoshop Elements. This effect softened the color and concentrated it in the center of the photograph. Finally, several of the “Tuskegee” logos on the athletes’ shirts were barely visible. To correct this, I used a 2 pixel paintbrush with a 46% opacity and one of the medium tone grays from the logo to paint in the missing letters. The final “after” image appears below. Alice Coachman appears to the right of the trophy.
The final image that I worked on was a photogragh of Althea Gibson that I imported from the web.4 Clearly, photography had improved by the 1950s, and this image did not need as much work. However, as you can see from the below side-by-side view, the image benefitted tremendously from vignetting, and from some simple tools that Photoshop offers.
The two tools that really sharpened this image were the auto contrast
and the unsharp mask features that let Photoshop do the work of
refining the brightness and contrast so as to clarify the image and sharpen
its focus. Due to some of the exposure problems in the upper right-hand corner
of the photograph, I though it would benefit from vignetting. This process
would also draw the viewer's attention away from the background crowd and place
it more firmly on Gibson. I used an elliptical marquee with a 20% feathering
to frame Gibson, and chose the red to provide contrast and to further emphasize
Gibson's leap for the ball. 
The remaining exposure problems were corrected
with the clone stamp tool. Finally, I also used the clone stamp to remove the
white clock to the left, which also drew the viewer's eye away from Gibson.
The end result was easy to achieve and transformed the original in a fairly
dramatic way.
Throughout this process, I discovered how much better images can be made to look for web use by employing some fairly simple techniques. More importantly, however, the assignment made me focus on the newspaper photographs of Alice Coachman and Althea Gibson and realize that the images of these athletes also have a history to tell us about mid-twentieth-century race and gender.
1 One exception was her hometown newspaper in Albany, Georgia. See The Albany Herald, 8 August 1948, p. 2B. Although the article appears on the front page of the newspaper, the picture of her, dressed in street clothes rather than as the Olympic champion high jumper, appears in the sports section.
2 http://www.transgender.org/tg/tvals/tvsep00.htm
3 Courtesy of the Darnaby Collection, Tuskegee University Archives.
4 http://www.altheagibson.com/gallery1.html