Marie
What Win Tam's Olympic Photos Teach Us About Movement in Portraits
Team China just unveiled their 2026 Winter Olympics uniforms. The uniforms are beautiful, Li-Ning designed pieces that blend traditional patterns with modern athletic wear, the kind of thing that makes fashion editors happy.
But that's not why I can't stop looking at these images.
Win Tam shot the editorial for Vogue China, and it's a masterclass in something most portrait photographers, myself included, don't do enough: using movement to reveal character.
The Curling Shot
A woman crouches over stacked curling stones, her ponytail shooting straight up like a flame.
The hair defies gravity. It creates tension. You feel the intensity of the release before it happens. The stacked red and black stones form a perfect triangle leading your eye directly to her. The geometry is flawless, but it's the hair, that impossible vertical line, that makes you feel something.
This isn't "here's the uniform." This is "here's what it feels like to be this athlete in this moment."
The Skier With the Ribbon
Shot from above, a skier descends through white space, trailing a long blue ribbon that curves and flows behind them.
The aerial perspective makes the athlete look small against the vastness. But that ribbon turns movement into something you can trace with your eyes. It's not just action, it's choreography. It transforms sport into dance.
The ribbon is doing the work that motion blur does in sports photography, but with intention and elegance.
The Olympic Rings
A profile portrait. Technically simple, subject turned away, snow dusting the skin and hair. But woven into the hair are the Olympic rings, sitting there like a casual crown.
It says "Winter Olympics" without being literal. It's playful and elegant at the same time. The snow on warm skin creates texture and temperature you can almost feel.
What This Means for Portrait Photography
Here's what Win Tam understood: movement isn't just for action photography.
In these shots, the athletes aren't competing. They're not even really moving in most frames, much of this is carefully staged. But the feeling of movement is everywhere. In hair. In ribbons. In geometry that suggests energy about to be released.
Most portrait photographers, and I'm guilty of this too, default to stillness. We ask people to hold a pose. We wait for them to settle. We capture the moment after the movement stops.
But stillness isn't always truth. Sometimes the truth is in the tension before the release. The hair that hasn't fallen yet. The breath that hasn't been exhaled.
The Takeaway
Next time you're photographing someone, ask yourself: what would movement add?
Not chaos. Not blur. But the suggestion of energy. A gesture caught mid-flight. Fabric that hasn't settled. Hair that remembers where it's been.
Win Tam didn't photograph uniforms. Win Tam photographed what it feels like to wear them.
That's the difference between documentation and portraiture.
Team China's 2026 Winter Olympics uniforms were designed by Li-Ning and photographed by Win Tam for Vogue China. The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics runs February 6-22.