The “outstanding situation” that Rentmeester devised for Jordan required the 21-year-old player to take flight toward a hoop that stood on a grassy knoll beneath a blue sky.
“Normally, people would have taken Jordan onto a basketball court, but I had this unique idea,” the photographer said.
He directed Jordan to leap into the air with a basketball in his left hand and his legs splayed in near-perfect ballet form—a nod to the masterful grand jetés performed by celebrated dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“Co told me that he wanted to create an image that people would never forget,” Dey said. “The irony is that people will never forget it—but at great personal cost to him.”
Losing altitude
Rentmeester’s Life photo essay debuted to great acclaim, bolstering his creativity and his reputation. But on a trip to Chicago months later, he noticed a billboard that, as he says in Dey’s film, made him feel as though he’d been “hit in the stomach.”
There was Jordan—newly signed to the Chicago Bulls—floating above the Windy City skyline, once again mimicking a Baryshnikov grand jeté. It was Kuhn’s Nike-commissioned photograph, but Rentmeester suspected what the Oregon-based shoe company had used as a reference.
Earlier that summer, an ad agency working with Nike had contacted Rentmeester requesting duplicate slides from his shoot with Jordan, vowing in writing that they wouldn’t copy or duplicate them. The agreed-upon fee was $150. “They said they needed them for research,” Rentmeester said.
Reaching out to Nike, the photographer threatened legal action over what he perceived to be similarities between the two images, but was persuaded to accept $15,000 and the possibility of future employment—though that employment ultimately never materialized. It was an offer that proved impossible to refuse for a freelance photographer supporting a family on an often unpredictable salary.
“I felt very restricted because as a single individual taking on the law firms that Nike could produce, there seemed like very little chance that I would go far,” Rentmeester said of why he accepted that deal, adding that he would have happily licensed his Life pictures to Nike for both the billboard and the Jumpman logo had they asked. “They simply ignored me because they felt they were powerful enough to just throw me under the bus in a certain way.”