“Our Bodies Bear the Traces of All We Have Endured”: An Exhibition Exploring Body Photography | Photography

pThermal imaging has the unique ability to take us directly to the human extreme. Whether it’s the strangers photographed by Diane Arbus, Edward Muybridge’s studies of the divine movement of the human body, views of remote indigenous communities captured by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, or live shots of heated competition from sports photographer Walter Eeus, photographs can dazzle us with transformative dispatches from the margins of the human condition.

These four photographers, along with about thirty others, can be seen in the Phoenix Art Museum’s engaging new show, Muscle Memory. It aims to delve into the question of how our human bodies can simultaneously be the focus of so much of our awareness while also being something we often ignore.

“I was thinking about our bodies as sites of true contradiction,” said curator Emilia Mickevicius via video interview. “Sites of pleasure and pain, strength and vulnerability. I was really looking for work where the photographer was wrestling with the state of embodiment, and what it feels like to be in a body and move through the world.”

Mickevicius’s search results include a photo of NBA legends Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley facing off for a rebound, a photo of a Muxe known as Magnolia from the Zapotec city of Juchitán, Iranians disappeared at the hands of their government, and basic parts of life like aging, death, and pregnancy. On a purely visual level, Muscle Memory is a real bonus, a collection of visuals as eye-catching as you’ll see anywhere.

One way muscle memory achieves Mikivicius’s goal of depicting embodiment is through moments of great physical exertion. By synchronizing his lens with a flashing light, Harold Edgerton captured the brute force of a tennis serve at intervals of 1/1000 of a second – and his work Serving Tennis offers a vision of a familiar move that makes it distinct and entirely new.

Edgerton’s countless ghostly iterations of a single tennis racket strike the reader in the face with the blunt force of a deft swing, forcing audiences to pick up a new visual language when viewing his image. “It’s funny to think that, until shutter speeds became fast enough, people literally couldn’t achieve that with their eyes,” Mickevicius said. “These techniques require new interpretive equipment on the part of the viewer.”

Another image that obliges viewers to raise their eyeballs is Claire Warden’s “no camera” photography, which literally brings her body into contact with the film. No. 15 (Genetics), from her Mimesis series, shows her fingerprint, which she etched into the film emulsion with her saliva. “You have an image of her fingerprint that is saturated with her DNA,” Mikivicius said.

Warden chose to paint the atypical “self-portrait” after repeatedly encountering the impolite question “Who are you?” Because of her mixed origins. “I turned to cameraless photography to make these images that are full of information, but lacking clarity or definition,” Mickevicius said.

Other images in Muscle Memory seem closer to performance art. William Camargo’s As Far as I Can Get series sees the photographer set the shutter release for 10 seconds, then rush as fast as possible away from the camera. Paying homage to conceptual artist John Divola’s initial idea, which was incited by the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Camargo captured such images in a variety of locations.

“Camargo brings his life experience as a brown person and what it means to run in an urban environment,” Mickevicius said. “It’s the idea of: ‘I can’t run down an alley as a brown person and have me read it the same way you can.'”

Body modification is also a big topic in muscle memory, whether it’s in the many images of tattooed individuals, George Dureau’s Wilbert with a Hook, which shows a man whose left arm has been replaced by a prosthetic with a hand hook, Brian Weil’s untitled portrait of a bodybuilder, Rosalind Fox Solomon’s photographs of her own aging body, or Lauren Greenfield’s moving image of three teenage girls holding each other at his girlfriend’s sixteenth birthday party.

“It depicts teenagers and young women and reflects on issues related to body image and beauty standards of 2000-era girl culture,” Mickevicius said. “It’s something I can definitely relate to, having grown up at that time, and I’m certainly grateful that Greenfield is confronting how corrosive these norms can be to our culture.”

Part of the challenge with a show like Muscle Memory is that it can often exploit vulnerable people who don’t get a chance to speak for themselves. For example, photographs like those by Arbus or Iturbide run the risk of alienating their subjects, presenting them to the public as objects to be gazed upon without the proper context to truly understand their humanity.

This was an aspect of muscle memory that Mickievicius did not take lightly, and with the show she hopes that the audience will be able to experience the exhibition as a space to enjoy real moments of empathy. “I want to believe that we can still learn things about our fellow human beings by looking at pictures of them,” Mikivicius said. “Why do we look at certain images and decide on their behalf that they should be ashamed of who they are? There is no better place to consider questions like this than a museum.”

In addition to being gateways to empathy, photographs provide the opportunity to see more fully the effects of the lives we live. By highlighting the “memory” in muscle memory, the images in this show reflect not only the decisive moment in which they were captured, but also the entirety of a lifetime that brought a subject to the moment. Look at these images long enough, and you might swallow them. “To be human is to endure suffering, and you cannot escape life without going through that,” Mikivicius said. “I think of bodies as great teachers in this life. Our bodies carry the traces of everything we’ve been through, they’re those sites where we encounter these limits to what we can do.”