Chess photography
Open-knowledge reference entry
The earliest surviving photograph depicting chess is most often credited to William Henry Fox Talbot, and consists of a portrait of two players seated at a chess board. There is still considerable debate as to who should be credited with the image. Titled Chess Players, the photo was published in Nicolaas Henneman's 1847 collection Talbotypes or Sun Pictures. One of the players, Antoine Claudet, was a known friend of Talbot. However, the identity of his opponent, initialed "M", is still unknown.
Among those photographed during the early development of film photography was Emanuel Lasker, World Chess Champion from 1894 to 1921. Most early chess photography took place in New York, which had developed into a hub for chess hustlers, enthusiasts, and professionals over the twentieth century. Famous photographer Stanley Kubrick played chess at Washington Square Park, which served as a filming site for multiple chess movies filmed in the late 20th century.
In 1972, Bobby Fischer played in the World Chess Championship, representing the US, facing Boris Spassky of the USSR in Reykjavik. The match was broadcast worldwide, and the stakes were high given cultural, social, and political tension between the USSR and USA. Fischer invited Harry Benson, a photographer, and Brad Darrasch, a reporter from LIFE magazine, to watch him prepare.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chess photography” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.