Herschdorfer, N: Henry Leutwyler

The IOC heritage collections contain hundreds of thousands of objects and a kilometer of documents from the history of the modern Olympic Games-from rare medals and torches, to vintage sporting equipment, curiosities, prostheses and even doping control sets. Olympia, named after the site of the ancient Greek Olympic Games, contains more than 1,000 of Henry Leutwyler's photographs of the gems in this collection.Leutwyler spent six weeks at The Olympic Museum in Lausanne, painstakingly arranging and photographing in his trademark empathetic forensic style, teasing out the personality of these objects and exposing normally overseen details. Volumes 1 presents objects arranged not chronologically, but shaped by intuition and juxtaposition: Jesse Owen's and Carl Lewis' shoes side by side; Leni Riefenstahl's original film reels from Olympia (1938), documenting the controversial 1936 Summer Games in Berlin; the skateboard used to successfully pitch the sport for the Tokyo 2020 Games... A detailed glossary reveals the specifics and contexts of each object. Volume 2 focuses on hundreds of documents from the IOC's heritage collections-tickets, postcards, identity cards, posters, menus and more-itself a journey through typographic and graphic design history. The resulting encyclopedic book covers the entire arc of the modern Olympic Games, from Athens 1896 to Tokyo 2020, and is an unprecedented artistic record not only of sporting history, but also of the Olympic values throughout more than a century of social and political change.