“You know you’ve got [basketball star] Michael Jordan and it’s not so hard to take a good picture of him. Is it more difficult to take a great picture? I think so, yeah. You’re always going for something dramatic.” - Walter Iooss
Iooss has photographed every single one of the first 52 Super Bowls; published a book on the 18 months he spent following US athletes as they prepared for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles called Shooting for the Gold; created a New York Times bestselling photo essay, Rare Air, with Michael Jordan; and shot campaigns for the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and more.
In more recent years, his pictures have been the subject of several gallery shows and a solo artist auction at Christie’s New York in 2020 called Athlete: Photographs by Walter Iooss, Jr. The exhibitions include Athlete: The Sports Illustrated Photography of Walter Iooss at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in 2009; Sport: Iooss and Leifer at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009; and LEGENDS: The Sports Photography of Walter Iooss at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut in 2019-2020.
In 2018, Iooss was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.