Photography has a unique capacity to take us right to humanity’s extremes. Whether it’s the outsiders photographed by Diane Arbus, the revelatory motion studies of the human body made by Eadweard Muybridge, views of remote Indigenous communities taken by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, or in-your-face shots of heated competition from the sports photographer Walter Iooss, photographs can wow us with transformational dispatches from the fringes of the human condition.
All four of those photographers, plus about three dozen more, can be seen at the Phoenix Art Museum’s captivating new show Muscle Memory. It aims to delve into the question of how our human bodies can at once be the focus of so much of our awareness while also being something we frequently ignore.
“I was thinking about our bodies as these sites of real contradiction,” said show curator Emilia Mickevicius via video interview. “Sites of pleasure and pain, strength and vulnerability. I was really looking for work where the photographer was grappling with the condition of embodiment, what it feels like to be in a body and move through the world.”
The results of Mickevicius’s search include a photo of the NBA legends Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley facing off for a rebound, a portrait of a Muxe person known as Magnolia from the Zapotec city of Juchitán, Iranians disappeared by their own government, and basic parts of life such as ageing, death and pregnancy. On a purely visual level, Muscle Memory comes across as a true bounty, as eye-catching an array of photos as you’ll see anywhere.
One of the ways Muscle Memory fulfils Mickevicius’s goal to depict embodiment is through moments of remarkable physical exertion. Synchronizing his lens with a strobe light, Harold Edgerton captured the brute force of a tennis serve at 1/1,000th-second intervals – his work Tennis Serve offers a view of a familiar action that renders it both recognizable and utterly new.
Edgerton’s innumerable, ghostly repetitions of a singular tennis racket smacks a reader in the face with the blunt force of a masterful strike, forcing audiences to pick up a new visual language when viewing his photo. “It’s funny to think about how, until shutter speeds got fast enough, people literally couldn’t access that with their eyes,” said Mickevicius. “These technologies mandate new interpretive equipment on the part of the viewer.”
Another image that mandates viewers upgrade their eyeballs comes with Claire Warden’s “camera-less” photography, which literally brings her body into contact with film. No 15 (Genetics), from her Mimesis series, shows her fingerprint, which she has etched into the film emulsion by way of her own saliva. “You have an image of her fingerprint that’s imbued with her own DNA,” said Mickevicius.
Warden chose to make the atypical “self-portrait” after repeatedly being confronted with the impolite question “what are you?” due to her mixed ancestry. “She turned to camera-less photography to make these images that are so full of information, but that refuse clarity or legibility,” said Mickevicius.
Other photos in Muscle Memory come off as more akin to performance art. William Camargo’s As Far as I Can Get series sees the photographer setting his shutter release for 10 seconds, then dashing as fast as he can away from the camera. A homage to the initial idea of conceptual artist John Divola, and instigated by the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Camargo has taken such photos in a variety of locations.
“Camargo is bringing his own lived experience as a brown person and what it means to run through the urban environment,” said Mickevicius. “It’s this idea of: ‘I can’t run down an alley as a brown person and have it be read in the same way as you can.’”
Body modification is also a big theme of Muscle Memory, be it in the many photos of tattooed individuals, George Dureau’s photograph Wilbert With Hook, which shows a man whose left arm has been replaced with a prosthetic with a hook for a hand, Brian Weil’s untitled snap of a bodybuilder, Rosalind Fox Solomon’s photos of her own ageing body, or Lauren Greenfield’s moving photo of three teenage girls holding one another at a friend’s 16th birthday party.
“She photographs teenagers and young women and thinks about issues around body image and beauty standards for the Y2K-era girl culture,” said Mickevicius. “It’s something I can certainly relate to, having grown up in that time, and I’m certainly grateful that Greenfield is facing how corrosive those standards can be to our culture.”
Part of the challenge to a show like Muscle Memory is the potential for exploitation of often vulnerable subjects who do not get a chance to speak for themselves. Photos like those taken by Arbus or Iturbide, for instance, run the risk of exoticizing their subjects, exhibiting them to audiences as items to be gazed at without the proper context to really understand their humanity.
This was an aspect of Muscle Memory that Mickevicius did not take lightly, and her hope for the show is that audiences will be able to experience the exhibition as a space in which to have authentic moments of empathy. “I want to believe we can still learn things about fellow human beings by looking at pictures of them,” Mickevicius said. “Why do we look at certain pictures and decide on their behalf that they should be ashamed of who they are? There’s no better place than a museum to consider questions like that.”
In addition to being portals into empathy, photographs provide the opportunity to see the traces of a life lived fully. Highlighting the “memory” in Muscle Memory, the photos in this show reflect not just the decisive moment in which they were snapped but also the entirety of a lifetime that has brought a subject right to the instant. Gaze into these images long enough, and you can become engulfed. “To be human is to endure suffering, you can’t escape life without going through that,” said Mickevicius. “I’m thinking about bodies as being pretty big teachers in this life. Our bodies bear traces of everything we’ve endured, they’re these sites where we come up against these limits of what we can do.”
