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- The groundbreaking ceremony for the Centennial Olympic Stadium with Billy Payne and then Mayor Maynard Jackson. “All they had was a parking lot and flags they’d brought down from City Hall,” says McCullers. “That moment was such a leap of faith.”
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- Early construction on Centennial Olympic Park. The bomb went off just about where the trailer sits in the middle of the photo. “It seems almost prophetic now,” says McCullers.
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- “This photo has tremendous symbolism for me,” says McCullers. The worker at the right appears to be holding up the “Gateway of Dreams” sculpture as it is installed. With the Games, it was as though Atlanta carried the whole weight of the world.
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- Rodin’s “The Shade” in front of the High Museum. “The statue is almost like a hostage, with its hand reaching for the patrons standing inside,” McCullers says. “It represents that everything we lost during the Orly plane crash was coming back to us.”
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- One of McCullers’ favorite photos of the Games is this shot of ironworkers putting the Olympic rings on the bridge that went from the stadium to the cauldron. “If Woody Guthrie had gone to the Olympics, this was where he would’ve been,” says McCullers.
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- Outside Olympic Stadium before the track and field gold medal event. “The two stadiums were side by side,” says McCullers. “It was like having two Super Bowls next to each other. It was one of those moments you capture for yourself.”
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- “This woman was one of the first people inside Olympic Stadium,” says McCullers. “She’s sitting on the edge of her seat holding the American flag. It seemed to sum up all the anxiety, anticipation, optimism and patriotism of the Games.”
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- McCullers took this photo at 10 a.m. inside Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium prior to the first Olympic event. What struck him was the unique position of the shadows in right field, something that never happened during afternoon or evening games.
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- The crown jewel of the 1996 Olympic Games was Centennial Olympic Park. McCullers took this photo on July 26, hours before Eric Robert Rudolph set off a bomb. “It captures a joyous, incredibly optimistic moment,” says McCullers.
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- McCullers went downtown the day after the bombing. “I didn’t know how I was going to react,” he says. “There was no more innocence. I photographed the reflection in a pool of water, upside down. The raindrops formed circles, like the Olympic rings.”
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- In this shot during the Olympic trials, McCullers captures the musculature of the runner in front so vividly that the frontrunner’s left leg almost looks like an x-ray photo.
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- McCullers calls this a “total design piece.” It’s the circle discus throwers had to stand inside prior to their toss. “It’s only two or three inches deep, but it had rained and it was filled up with water and became a reflecting pool,” he says.
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- This photo is from the Olympic diving competition. “I’ve never made this into a print,” says McCullers. “I happened to see it turned upside down, and I prefer it that way. It gives the photo a surreal context.”
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- McCullers took this magical shot from the top of Olympic Stadium moments before Michael Johnson won the Gold Medal and set a new world record in the 200 meter run.
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- The final event of the 1996 Games: the men’s marathon. The start of the race can be seen on the video screen in the center of the photo. The runners ended up in the ghostly and virtually empty Olympic Stadium.
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- These images were shot “after the circus left town.” McCullers wanted to capture multiple images to depict the immediate aftermath of the Games.
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- This photo from inside Olympic Stadium was taken before the Games, but also acts as a symbolic coda. “Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium is in the background like a rising moon, and it was like Atlanta rising out of the ashes,” he says.
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This story is part of WABE and ArtsATL’s Cultural Olympiad coverage.
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In 1990, when Atlanta pulled off the impossible and won the right to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, photographer Charlie McCullers recognized history was in the making and began a seven-year project to document the Games. Except those photographs were never published … until now. “I think these shots needed the weight of history,” McCullers says. “And 20 years after the fact now makes them history.”
An Atlanta native, McCullers graduated from the University of Georgia in 1980 and soon opened a commercial photography studio. While he worked with many Fortune 500 companies, he also followed his muse with trips to Africa, Asia and other exotic locales to hone his aesthetic style. In the ’90s, he began to photograph the Atlanta Braves in black and white images. Many of those photographs were featured in Atlanta magazine and, in 1996, were exhibited at Turner Field for the next four years. McCullers was then commissioned by the High Museum of Art to be the principal photographer for the much-heralded Sir Elton John Chorus of Light exhibit in 2000-01.
McCullers began to photograph Atlanta Ballet in 2000 and is now the ballet’s principal photographer. He also recently completed his Master’s studies at SCAD Atlanta.
These photos of the 1996 Games remain close to McCullers’ heart, even though they were never published. “The photos were not commissioned,” McCullers says. “Six months before the Games, a book publisher offered me tickets to every event if I’d let him use some of my images for a coffee-table book. So a few of my shots were published there.”
For the most part, McCullers was shooting for himself, experimenting with artistic styles and taking photographs that spoke to his own experience with the Games. “I had no press credentials,” he says. “I jumped a fence or two during construction, but by and large I shot what I had access to. Some of my tickets were upper level, some were down front. I had front row seats to the gymnastics finals; the whole Kerri Strug saga happened right in front of me.”
But McCullers didn’t photograph the most striking moment he witnessed during the Olympic festivities, which happened during the closing night of the Paralympic Games that soon followed the Olympic Games.
As Jerry Lee Lewis performed “Great Balls of Fire,” McCullers spied two athletes from different countries, a man and a woman. Neither had arms, yet they stood on the field and hugged with their torsos and necks. “I couldn’t take the picture,” McCullers says. “I couldn’t impose on that moment. Fireworks were exploding, and these people realized they were about to fly back home and leave behind the single best connection to humanity they’ll ever know.”
