Co Rentmeester can’t look at the Jumpman logo. The blacked-out silhouette of a floating Michael Jordan, which has adorned millions of pairs of Air Jordan sneakers for decades, still irritates him.
“I turn my eyes away,” Rentmeester says.
It’s an unnatural reaction for Rentmeester, a Dutch photographer who’s spent much of his life training his eyes, and lenses, on subjects no matter how challenging they may be. At Life magazine, he documented the Watts uprising in 1965 and embedded himself with troops in the Vietnam War. He’s huddled with snow monkeys in the mountains of Japan and followed polar bears across Canada’s tundra.
The 88-year-old Rentmeester, who was an Olympic rower before he found photojournalism, has seen it all. One thing he can’t bear to see anymore, though, is that logo.
“I cannot bounce back from it,” Rentmeester says. “I will never forget this.”
So, what happened with him and the Jumpman?
In 1984, Life commissioned Rentmeester for a photo essay on American Olympians for a special issue timed to that year’s Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. As part of the assignment, he traveled to the University of North Carolina’s campus in Chapel Hill that February to photograph a young Michael Jordan, who’d not yet played an NBA game nor signed a deal with Nike. Rentmeester instructed Jordan to leap through the air, his legs splayed out in the fashion of a ballet dancer.
After Rentmeester’s photo of Jordan was published across a two-page spread in Life that summer, Nike took note. Peter Moore, the Nike creative director responsible for the look of the Air Jordan line, paid Rentmeester $150 for two transparencies of the photo that August. Nike then created a similar image, its version showing Jordan jumping in nearly the same pose. From that photo it would derive the Jumpman logo, a sportswear symbol that is now globally recognizable and (no doubt to the chagrin of Rentmeester) nearly unavoidable.
Rentmeester never got credit for it. He would allege in a lawsuit decades later that Nike agreed to pay him $15,000 in March 1985 for limited use of his Jordan image for two years, the sneaker company relenting only after Rentmeester’s constant badgering and threats of litigation.
Rentmeester has intermittently fought for recognition for his role in making the image of Air Jordan since then. As he nears 90, there is still plenty of fight in him.
“I felt so strongly that the evidence that I had and my story was so solid that legally [Nike] couldn’t get out of it,“ Rentmeester says.
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