The Images That Make Us: Lucy Shuker At The Paralympic Games

In our newest column The Images That Make Us, writer, founder and CEO of MTArt Agency, Marine Tanguy, selects a painting, sculpture, or a photograph and responds to its creative and cultural moment and importance in how it shapes us as individuals. First up, is Lucy Shuker at the 2024 Paralympic Games.

We are experiencing change and societal progress at the fastest speed we have ever known as humans. Some embrace it, run with it, others reject it entirely, while most sit on the fence. I wanted to choose this image of British wheelchair tennis player Lucy Shuker to illustrate this tension between change and us.

Everything is here: the emotion, the racket hitting the ball and… the handicap. Everything feels positive, except the stark visibility of the lack of audience as we see in the empty seats in the background. I wanted to start my column with this powerful image that I just saw on the news in the midst of the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games. It captures and highlights the difficulty in changing mentalities. While British wheelchair tennis player Lucy Shuker is competing at the highest level, audiences are not yet ready to watch it, nor celebrate it. That delay between change and people embracing change is here, represented by empty seats. And it isn’t just a problem in sports, it’s a problem we find across all areas of our lives. There are so many empty seats everywhere. Women are ready to be empowered but most of the adverts that we see on our streets still objectify them, us. We want our world to be more sustainable and yet, as we walk around the streets of mega cities like London, encountering thousands of commercial visuals pushing us to consume more every single day. Visuals and words differ.

The power of visuals is immense – they tell us so much more than words. Lucy isn’t just another athlete, she is someone we can now connect with, humanise, empathise with and hopefully with her sport too. All of this thanks to this powerful picture alone. Being exposed to a variety of visual representations is therefore critical. Its imperative to be challenged visually, to find detail in the everyday in what we consume to encapsulate a fuller story. Visuals introduce a lot of nuance into this binary world. Understanding why this image was chosen over another, why it was shot from this angle and which source publishes it will tell you so much already about the way in which the author wants you to think.

Pause for a second and ask yourself: When was the last time you saw an image of someone handicapped that we didn’t pity, yet looked so strong and capable? The offload of images from the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games makes us recognise the amount of images we are missing on our streets, magazines and digital devices of people who can do and yet, they have an handicap. That image highlights the lack of so many other images. Sport allowed us to see the reality of being handicapped. The last fight of these athletes is not to be winning medals but to be humanised, to be integrated as part of our daily visual narrative. The empty seats are us, telling us we need to join the games, watch them and advocate for them. It’s the beginning of a much needed change of perception on handicap.