Our bodies are witness to everything we experience. Consider each scar, tattoo, wrinkle, stretchmark, freckle – they’re a visual record of our lives, mapping out moments of pain, joy or the inevitable passage of time. They’re also inherently political: to have a woman’s body is to experience society differently to those who present as male; to be seen as conventionally attractive will often garner more attention; to have a skin colour other than white is to become entangled in complicated and oftentimes traumatic histories of racism and prejudice. Our physical selves are tied up with some of the biggest questions of our time: How can we make sense of our bodies in a political world? Who is allowed to feel at home in their selves? Is ageing something to fight or something to honour? What stories do our bodies tell?
These questions, and the answers contemporary artists offer, are the heart of a new show at Phoenix Art Museum. Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body explores how photographers across history have represented and reckoned with the human body. There are more than 80 images on display, by pioneering artists like Diane Arbus, Graciela Iturbide, Richard Avedon and W. Eugene Smith. Jeremy Mikolajczak, CEO of the museum, says: “[The show] offers a view into the human experience that is both compelling and relatable. From sports imagery and self-portraiture to abstract compositions, this exhibition considers all aspects of the body in every stage of evolution.” In four distinct and fascinating thematic sections, Muscle Memory offers nuanced and vital perspectives on how our bodies at once empower and limit us.
Visitors begin with Surface Tension, which considers skin as a canvas for self-expression. Featured artists ask what it is possible to know about a person by looking at them, including how a subject’s outward appearance can exist in tension with their interiority. Diane Arbus and John Gutmann spotlight individuals who have changed their image with tattoos, makeup and other markings, exploring the human impulse to use the body as a canvas for personal expression. Meanwhile, Kinetic Beauty features the body in motion, with a specific focus on sports imagery. Here, we see the body pushed to its limits, where athletes represent the highest levels of physical performance, endurance and contortion. Terrell Groggin’s 2018 black-and-white shot of a boxing match is a prime example. In it, two figures – Claressa Shields and Hanna Gabriels – face off in the ring, they’re poised to strike and every muscle is strained, ready to spring. Groggin captures more than the tangible, distilling the physical tension felt before a major moment. The same is true of Walter Looss’ shot of NBA legend Michael Jordan and teammates. Seven men are caught mid-jostle, their eyes turned upwards towards the net, waiting to see what happens.
Know Thyself highlights the work of photographers who have used the medium, often in the form of self-portraiture, to grapple with issues of aging, beauty standards and self-image. Rosalind Fox Solomon recorded her own ageing body, with images she began taking in middle-age and continued through until her death at 95. As Christina Cacouris write in a 2024 New Yorker article, “Fox Solomon lets the self-portraits in her book starkly convey the brutality of aging. Her pictures, many of them nudes, feature open sores, shattered nails, and bones jutting out of feet almost to the point of pushing through the skim…where Ingres, Botticelli and Titian sought to create an elongated and elegant form, Fox Solomon crouches, bends and stares at the viewer.” Anne Noggle similarly grapples with the march of time, although in this instance, the artist addresses the Sisyphean task of keeping up with beauty standards. Facelift #3 (1975) documents Noggle’s own face as she recovers from plastic surgery. The University of New Mexico explains, she “documents her recovery from a procedure that is often regarded as private, in a time where women often kept themselves out of sight until fully healed. Instead, she embraces this vulnerable and ephemeral state of her body, like her relationship with age, and makes it visible.”
The final section, Enduring, presents works by Nan Goldin, Ittetsu Morishita, Marcus Chormicle and others depicting the body as witness as its physical limits, whether due to physical exertion, illness, injury and even death and absence, prompting viewers to consider the concepts of enduring and survival. It’s a sombre note to leave the show on, but ultimately offers a full and rounded picture of what it means to exist in the world. The show’s curator, Emilia Mickevicius, sums this up perfectly in an interview with the Guardian: “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 reminds audiences that the body is not a static object to be judged or perfected, but a living archive that resists and remembers. As visitors move through the galleries, they are confronted with the intimacy of embodiment: the ways that skin can carry markers of identity and defiance, how our physicality can be pushed to extremes to achieve greatness, and the inevitable, profound and unforgiving realities of ageing. The photographs on display do not offer any easy answers to the questions set out, instead, they ask us to give more thought to the ways we exist in the world. If our bodies are witness, they are also storytellers, carrying evidence of survival, vulnerability and change. It is our job to listen.
Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body is at Phoenix Museum of Art from 24 January – 28 June: phxart.org
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Harold Edgerton, Golf Drive by Densmore Shute, 1938, 1938. Gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase, 78.189.7. © Harold Edgerton, MIT, courtesy of Palm Press Inc.
2. Rosalind Fox Solomon, New York, NY, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Rosalind Solomon Archive, 2007.7.19.1. © Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved.
3. Claire A. Warden, Genetics from the series Mimesis. Cameraless Photograph. © Claire A. Warden.
4. Terrell Groggins, Gabriels and Shields Square Up Round 1, 2018, printed 2021. Inkjet print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Center for Creative Photography Photojournalism Fund, 2021.01.06. © Terrell Groggins My Art My Rules.
5. Leon Borensztein, Woman with Tattoo, San Francisco, 1984. Gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase, 86.8.1. © Leon Borensztein
