Craig Millman
Tonya Harding at the 1992 Olympics Craig Millman We are looking at a color photographic image, roughly 9.3 inches tall and 6.4 inches wide, of a young woman in what appears to be a burgundy figure skating outfit, confronting two older women who are cropped behind some kind of barricade. The girl occupies the left side of the image with her foot projecting into the right side of the image. Our point of view appears to be about the subject’s eye level, only a few feet away. Alternatively the image may have been taken from further away with a telephoto lens. The graininess of the image suggests it was captured from a distance or sampled off a television screen.
The central figure, former American figure skater Tonya Harding, is cropped at the bottom of the image, mid-thigh. The photo extends a foot or two beyond the top of her head. She is splayed in an awkward position. She stands with her torso perpendicular to the camera, bearing her weight on her left leg, which extends straight out the bottom of the image. Her right leg projects up at about a sixty degree angle away from her body and towards the viewer and upper right corner of the image. It rests upon the ledge of a purple and white barricade that separates her from two women in the foreground and four in the background.
She wears a white skating boot with attached gold skate and mounting armature. She holds the lace of the boot tentatively in her right index finger and likely her thumb which is hidden. She appears to be demonstrating something regarding the lace to the two women before her, while blurry figures in the background look on.
Image Quality
The image is full color with a complete spectrum of tonal variation. The main colors in the image are a magenta/burgundy blues, reds lots of white and some yellow. The lower half of the image is dominated by a mottled white wall with hints of blue and bold yellow and blue curves. The overall image quality is poor, characterized by a graininess and pixilation that suggests the image has been degraded by reproduction, was a still from a videotape or perhaps captured from a television screen.
Clothing
Tonya wears a skimpy, burgundy, leotard-like dress made of layers of sheer fabric dappled with white decorative dots that are likely sequins. The dress is clearly made of a tight and somewhat sheer fabric. It bunches about her torso where it seems to conform rather tightly to her body, while the sleeve rests lightly over her right shoulder. The variance in hue at the shoulder and hint of continuation of line from her arm to shoulder suggests the fabric is translucent. At her torso it is darker, apparently in shadow, but also from a variation in thickness or the addition of layers. It is more opaque.
Beneath her waist, the dress ends in a tiny ruffled skirt about crotch level, at the top of her thighs. The angle at which she holds her leg up exposes the fabric underneath her skirt: burgundy panties or the continuation of the leotard. It’s a far from ladylike pose.
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