From the mid-thirties to the early seventies LIFE was one of the most influential factories of visual imagination of the last century. Founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, the magazine put the recorded image at the centre of its account of the world, joining spectacle and intimacy, document and vision.

In telling winter sport it managed to fuse journalistic rigour, aesthetic attention and human storytelling, following an arc that runs from the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics to those of Sapporo, across wars, reconstructions and geopolitical change. The pictures, by figures such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Silk, John Dominis and Ralph Crane, speak of far more than sport.