New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #9
This is a collection of five* things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.
They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.
*It used to be ten but that was getting a bit too taxing… Five is plenty!
I really enjoyed this piece on the Wellcome Collection blog about the relationship between health and work:
The ancient Greek god of blacksmiths, Hephaestus – or Vulcan, as the Romans knew him – was often shown with his anvil and tools. He was also traditionally depicted as having a physical disability. Archaeological evidence shows that Bronze Age metalworkers were exposed to the highly toxic heavy metal arsenic. Representing Hephaestus as disabled may have represented the symptoms that ancient metalworkers suffered.
From that, I ended up on a BMJ article about the light therapist Auguste Rollier’s portraits of patients, which argued that Rollier’s work was driven by aesthetic preoccupations, and that “that the patient's progress and final cure, and thus the therapy's efficacy, were determined by aesthetic criteria—read through the body itself and its photographic representation.”
They are certainly arresting images (lots more here):
Here’s the arm wrestler Denis Cyplenkov smashing some walnuts:
Did I post this before? There were a few of these lyrical cycling documentaries made in the ‘70s. Jørgen Leth made some particularly fine examples, like Stars and Water Carriers (despite his creepiness, I think his work in sport is incredible).
This film, La Course en Tete, was made by Joël Santoni in 1974 as a study of Eddy Merckx at the peak of his powers. I love the pairing of Merckx’s cycling and David Munrow’s radical early music soundtrack. I find this transition from the massage to the mountains totally exhilarating: