Wrestlers of WCW

In 1996 I was hired by TNT to shoot an Advertising campaign for World Championship Wrestling. The WCW was really hitting its stride in the mid-90’s and surpassing the WWF in notoriety and ratings, partially due to the success of Monday Nitro, a live action weekly televised event.

The assignment was straightforward: shoot the stars of the WCW featuring Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Rey Mysterio. I was hired because of my experience shooting dancers; bodies in motion. In my opinion Professional Wrestling is dance, or ‘White Trash Ballet’ as I deemed it then, falling somewhere between sport and performance art. It’s rehearsed, and although it has plot lines and scripts the athleticism is very real, albeit choreographed, as is most of the blood.

TNT wanted color photography shot in my style; beautifully lit saturated portraits that would highlight the wrestlers’ musculature and oily skin. So this is what I set out to do.

Around that time the Polaroid Company had created a beautiful black and white instant film, Type 665, which came in a cartridge of 10 sheets that you loaded into the Polaroid back for your medium format camera, in my case the Mamiya RZ67. 665 was a fine grain positive/negative film made with layers of silver halide and image dyes that rendered a small instant BW print and a “peel apart” negative piece of film that you could use to create magnificent darkroom prints.

At the time I was supplementing most of my color film shoots with Polaroid Type 665. It was like digital photography is now, you could see your results almost instantly, within a minute, which meant if a wrestler threw himself through the air we would know right away if we had captured the action or not. It was intoxicating to see your results so quickly. And it had a beautiful artistic quality about it.

So I shot the wrestlers in color, occasionally sneaking sheets of 665 in between shots. The more BW prints accumulated on the table the more we all became enamored by them, including the Wrestlers! “These are so beautiful,” these massive men would say. They asked if they could keep some as souvenirs, which we allowed since we also had the negatives.

The creative team at TNT, recognizing they had something special, ended up using the BW Polaroid images for the campaign instead of the color images they originally had in mind.

– Andrew Eccles