Janosch Abel challenges flashy sports photography by immortalising the repetitive labour that truly shapes an athlete

As a former competitive swimmer, photographer Janosch Abel learnt early on in his sporting career that athletic life is far less glamorous than it looks from the outside. The countless hours of grit and training that take place behind the scenes form part of a laborious and intensive routine that often feels quite removed from all the buzz of competition crowds. It’s this imbalance – the intensity of daily training versus the brevity of the glory that comes with a win – that has shaped how the image maker has looked at sport ever since.

Jaosch’s practice is often tied to personal memory, and the photographer’s latest project, Training Diary, is an ongoing documentary series that explores this sporting contrast. A sequence of images that turns its attention “away from spectacle and toward the quiet, repetitive labor that defines professional sport”, Janosch says, Training Diary is comprised of systematically shot training sessions with athletes, that observe not the “moments of triumph” that we so normally see in sports photography, “but the long stretches of preparation that precede visibility”, the photographer says.

The images frame moments of pain, intensity and concentration that often go unseen – a runner squatting mid-trail to catch some air, a climber untaping their hands to nurse chalk covered calluses and sores. They purposefully dwell on the mundane, passing moments that are considered “visually unspectacular” in sports, says Janosch. But in deciding to turn his lens on this side of the game, the photographer aims to “challenge the dominant image economy of professional athletics, which favors peak performance over process,” he says. “What emerges is a portrait of the sport as a routine rather than a singular event.”

Sports photography isn’t new to Janosch – through his work on larger campaigns and shoots with brands, he’s been working closely with athletes for a large part of his career in a commercial capacity, so finding athletes to document came quite easily. Training Diary allowed the photographer to connect more personally with the community of sportspeople that he had met over the course of his career and capture a different side to what they do. Years of adapting to different surroundings and maintaining the pace it takes to capture athletes in motion prepared Janosch to capture these portraits: “It’s the dance between being present and keeping the connection with the athlete whilst simultaneously being in the background as an observer,” he says.

Photographed since 2022, the photo project spans a wide range of disciplines, including track and field, beach volleyball, mountain biking, ice hockey, rugby, swimming and bodybuilding. All of which Janosch has recently collated into a printed publication, but this is by no means a resolve for the series – there are endless training sessions the photographer would still like to tell the story of. Janosch is keen to focus on documenting athletes over even longer periods of time, aiming to make images that feel deeply familiar to those within the world of professional sports a world he summarises as: “sustained by discipline, patience, and a continuous negotiation between exhaustion and purpose.”