Our bodies tell a story of everything we've been through, and a new exhibition is here to prove it! Photography has this incredible power to transport us to the very edges of human experience. Think about Diane Arbus's iconic portraits of society's outsiders, Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking studies of motion, Graciela Iturbide's intimate glimpses into remote Indigenous communities, or Walter Iooss's electrifying sports photography. These images don't just show us things; they offer profound dispatches from the fringes of what it means to be human, leaving us in awe.
Now, imagine experiencing the work of these artists, along with about three dozen more, all in one place. The Phoenix Art Museum's new exhibition, Muscle Memory, does just that. It dives deep into a fascinating paradox: how our bodies are often the center of our attention, yet also something we frequently overlook. As show curator Emilia Mickevicius explained, she was drawn to how our bodies are "sites of real contradiction – sites of pleasure and pain, strength and vulnerability." She sought out work that grappled with the very essence of embodiment, the feeling of inhabiting a body and navigating the world.
The exhibition showcases a stunning array of images, from the intense on-court rivalry of NBA legends Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley to a poignant portrait of Magnolia, a Muxe individual from the Zapotec city of Juchitán. It also confronts fundamental aspects of life like aging, death, and pregnancy. Visually, Muscle Memory is an absolute feast, presenting a collection of photographs that are as captivating as they are thought-provoking.
One of the exhibition's triumphs is how it visually explores embodiment through moments of extreme physical exertion. Harold Edgerton, using a strobe light synchronized with his camera, captured the sheer power of a tennis serve at an astonishing 1/1,000th of a second. His photograph, Tennis Serve, transforms a familiar action into something both recognizable and utterly new. Edgerton's work, with its ghostly, repeated images of a tennis racket in motion, forces viewers to adopt a fresh perspective. Mickevicius noted, "It’s funny to think about how, until shutter speeds got fast enough, people literally couldn’t access that with their eyes. These technologies mandate new interpretive equipment on the part of the viewer."
But here's where it gets even more fascinating: Claire Warden's "camera-less" photography takes embodiment to a literal extreme. In No 15 (Genetics) from her Mimesis series, Warden directly incorporates her body into the photographic process. She etches her fingerprint onto the film emulsion using her own saliva, creating an image that is "imbued with her own DNA," as Mickevicius put it. Warden's unconventional self-portraits emerged after she was repeatedly asked the intrusive question, "what are you?" due to her mixed heritage. "She turned to camera-less photography to make these images that are so full of information, but that refuse clarity or legibility," Mickevicius explained.
And this is the part most people miss... Other pieces in Muscle Memory blur the lines with performance art. William Camargo's As Far as I Can Get series involves setting his camera's shutter for 10 seconds and then sprinting away. Inspired by conceptual artist John Divola and the tragic murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Camargo has created these powerful images in various locations. "Camargo is bringing his own lived experience as a brown person and what it means to run through the urban environment," Mickevicius shared. "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.’" Does this raise questions about how our identities shape our experiences of public spaces?
Body modification is another significant theme. The exhibition features numerous tattooed individuals, George Dureau's striking portrait Wilbert With Hook (showcasing a man with a prosthetic arm), Brian Weil's untitled photograph of a bodybuilder, Rosalind Fox Solomon's introspective images of her own aging body, and Lauren Greenfield's touching photograph of three teenage girls at a 16th birthday party.
Greenfield's work, as Mickevicius highlighted, "photographs teenagers and young women and thinks about issues around body image and beauty standards for the Y2K-era girl culture." Mickevicius added, "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." Is it fair to say that media and societal pressures have a disproportionate impact on young women's self-perception?
A crucial consideration for an exhibition like Muscle Memory is the potential for exploiting vulnerable subjects who may not have a voice. Photographs, like those by Arbus or Iturbide, can sometimes risk exoticizing individuals, presenting them as objects for observation without providing the full context of their humanity. Mickevicius approached this challenge with great care, hoping the exhibition fosters "authentic moments of empathy." She stated, "I want to believe we can still learn things about fellow human beings by looking at pictures of them. 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."
Beyond fostering empathy, photographs offer a window into lives fully lived. The "memory" in Muscle Memory isn't just about the instant a photo was taken; it encapsulates an entire lifetime that led to that moment. Gazing at these images can be an immersive experience. As Mickevicius put it, "To be human is to endure suffering, you can’t escape life without going through that. 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."
Muscle Memory is on display until June 28 at the Phoenix Art Museum. What are your thoughts on how photography can both reveal and challenge our perceptions of the human body? Share your views in the comments below!
