Jumping from a rope on the River Oredezh

150 x 150 cm, Edition of 6 + 2 AP 100 x 100 cm, Edition of 10 + 2 AP 60 x 60 cm, Edition of 6 + 2 AP; 5.000

Analog photography, C-type print

PHISCULTURA 1998 — 2008 Just before New Year 2000, while working in the St. Petersburg Archive of Cinematic and Photographic Documents, which contains over half a million photographs and negatives dating from 1860 onwards, I asked the archive staff for photographs about the way of life in St. Petersburg at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, was a proud, prosperous city which set the tone in business and culture for Russia and the rest of Europe. The archive’s staff, people who are charming and enthusiastic in their work, suggested that I look not only at photographs of balls, picnics and ateliers, but also at some files from the city’s sporting societies. These photographs were not popular in the Soviet period, and were soon deliberately forgotten. What I saw was a revelation in many senses — most of all because I naively imagined that fitness centres and gymnasiums were phenomena of our own time: the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. As early as the 1880s, however, Doctor Vladislav Kraevsky’s system «Muscle Development with the Help of Weights» was being widely practised in St. Petersburg. Doctor Kraevsky was convinced that man creates his own health and beauty, and that this could be achieved by exercises with weights. St. Petersburg’s first «fitness club» (then called «A Circle of Lovers of Athletics») opened on 10 August 1885. It was also at about that time that Prince Sergey Volkonsky introduced courses in eurhythmics for women (collections of works by classical composers were published especially to accompany the exercises). St. Petersburg was certain that it was not only the brilliantly educated and prosperous who could call themselves «modern», but also well-formed citizens who «possess shapely figures with elegant movements». By the end of the 19th century there were already more than 100 sporting societies in St. Petersburg. As you scrutinise the faces of these lovers of physical exercise from the distant past, you fall more and more under the power of their charm, which cannot immediately be explained. I tried to understand where that power lay. Those girls and boys from 100 years ago appeared to be contemporary: not in the kind of moustaches the men wore, nor in the emphasised waists of the girls, but in their desire to be worthy heroes of their time. And they managed to achieve this. They have stood the test of time. In that desire we are the same. I can identify with them. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, numerous sports magazines appeared in the Russian capital, full of advertisements for training apparatus and sportswear. Brochures with titles like «The Cult of the Body. Beauty and Strength» proposed various systems of morning gymnastics and special exercises for ladies which, for example, help women’s breasts to acquire a more seductive shape. Newly-opened sporting establishments attracted the public by promising «rapid development of the muscles, according to the norms of beauty and strength». St. Petersburg turned to the sporting legacy of the Greeks and Romans and saw in it a cure for stress and the key to success in a major industrial metropolis. «The body is the reflection of one’s state of health»: that is what they thought then, and that is still the opinion of Vladimir Dubinin, Chairman of the Russian Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation. He is convinced that «the main indication of fitness is a beautiful body». They thought the same 100 years ago, but they took a slightly broader view then: in 1912 the magazine «Strength and Health» invited all sportsmen, not only weightlifters, to take part in a «Beauty Contest». The participants were recommended not to wear underwear, since «it covers and alters the appearance of the body’s shape». The contest was carried out using photographs, which reflected one more enthusiasm of the time. In the early 20th century there were several dozen photographic studios in Nevsky Prospekt alone. The most popular of them was Karl Bulla’s studio. A queue of sportsmen with the desire to win the contest formed outside the studio. And most of the photographs of sports clubs at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are signed by the genius Karl Bulla. Girls, on the other hand, could not take part in such competitions in those days. Their photographs look extremely modest, but that modesty did not prevent girl gymnasts and cyclists from becoming the heroines of popular romance and adventure stories. When you go back to those old photographs and study the faces of those who lived in our city a century ago, with the same desire — to understand the force of their attraction — the idea occurs to you that they looked upon the photographer in the same way as they saw an artist painting their portrait, and revealed before the camera what was secret and beautiful in their nature — how they wished to be remembered. They were rightly proud of themselves and looked with confidence to the coming 20th century, not knowing, however, what it would bring. The strongmen from the «Cycling-Athletic» society, the girls at Henri Croisier’s Gymnastic Establishment, photographed in 1913… I like the fact that I do not know them (there are no names on the photographs). However, I do know what happened in the world a year later. That strength, health, and beauty too, went into exile or to the field of battle, to return many years later after their ordeal. The 1920s. A change in era. A change in types. A change in priorities. The athletic and gymnastic clubs became physical culture and fitness societies. Those that belonged to these societies had different aims: strength, endurance, the restoration of the health of a nation exhausted by wars. «Elegance of movement, beauty of manners» were not in fashion. In the gyms there were different societies like «Spartak» and «Dinamo», different faces, different exercises: fights with bags on a beam, climbing ropes and «industrial» gymnastics (gymnastics at factories and offices during working hours to increase productivity). The main aim at the time was the rehabilitation of the body (not in the sense of beauty, but its return to life; the main priority was general physical development). When they moved from workers’ and peasants’ suburbs into the centre of what had been St. Petersburg, but was now Leningrad, men and women learned the art of exercising with dumb-bells, not yet having exchanged their normal clothes for a sporting strip. Tatyana Kanevets (now Professor of History at the Lesgaft St. Petersburg University of Physical Culture and Sport), who was a middle-school student in the 1920s, says that the new age declared some sports (figure-skating and tennis, for example) to be bourgeois relics that were inexpedient in a country of workers and peasants. In 1931 a compulsory programme entitled GTO (Ready for Labour and Defence) was introduced in the country. Every schoolchild and every student (except those who were excused for health reasons), had to achieve standards set by the All-Union Soviet on Physical Culture in 15 different sports. Physical culture sessions were compulsory. Those who successfully achieved the required standards were proud of themselves and their awards (GTO badges of various grades). Professor Kanevets thinks that the GTO norms stood the country in good stead: they provided a full picture of the physical condition of the nation and helped to unearth talented sportsmen and sportswomen. One of country’s main tasks in the 1930s was to catch up and overtake the capitalist world in development (including physical development). The photographs of sporting societies in the 1920s taken by Semyon Magaziner show aggression and toughness, but also the powerful energy of the new age, striving to defend itself. The merit of these photographs is not only that, when set aside those of the fitness clubs at the beginning of the century, they showed the dramatic changes that had taken place. They also have their own charm — a thirst for life, and again the desire, albeit vague, to be attractive to themselves, and to us almost 100 years later. The late 1930s and 1940. The triumph of socialist realism in art and architecture. The triumph of socialist realism in forms. Gymnasts build pyramids, and their «living pictures» are tanks. “The tanks” which then rolled out on to Red Square in Moscow and Palace Square in St. Petersburg to take part in parades of gymnasts. The best parades were created by theatrical directors such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, with music written by Isaak Dunaevsky. In a united creative front, artists and sportsmen from all over the country put on vast shows. And everyone who took part in them still remembers the parades with delight, as Tatyana Kanevets recalls a dramatised battle with rifles that took up the whole of Red Square. «Grandiose!», she says. Rifles were an integral part of parades in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The GTO norms included the biathlon, shooting at targets, running in gas-masks, obstacle courses. The very best gymnasts trained at the Leningrad Physical Culture Theatre. A photograph of the theatre from 1940 shows six spear-throwers in a line. At the count of «one» they have taken a step forward and are ready to throw their spears. That is the moment at which the photographer has captured them. Not one of the spear-throwers has broken the contour of the lines. Another impressive photograph is of a pyramid of rifles arranged by girls and boys in white sporting strips. There is no doubt that it represents inspiration, not subject to the passage of time. Again we do not know the identity of these sportsmen who are reflecting, like artists, the premonition of a future war. They are young and good-looking, and the rifles in their hands are more pieces of sports equipment, part of a composition, than weapons of war. The 1960s. The Iron Curtain had already come down, cutting off the Soviet Union from the rest of the world, but frivolous French songs and fashions invaded the country. It was suddenly remembered that movements and poses could be romantic, and that the gymnastic clubs of artistic societies or ministries were not bad places to show off, carrying out elegant exercises with cane, ball or hoop, especially as one’s hairstyle was no hindrance. You could be noticed by colleagues exercising alongside, and you might then go skiing with them or canoeing in romantic spots in Karelia — places that required light, but powerful movements. Fresh air and communion with nature is now considered the best way to be healthy. Nature provides medicine for the body and the soul. In the 1960s everyone was dreaming of the skies: gymnasiums were only places to train for climbing mountain peaks or blasting off into space. Suburban sports centres were more in fashion than city clubs, where both ordinary people and the country’s young elite spent their spare time. In photographs from one of these centres near Moscow Edita Pyekha, the Soviet Union’s first pop star, is playing volleyball with Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut. She is dressed in a skin-tight sporting costume, with sunglasses and the inevitable «babetta» hairstyle. She is smiling broadly. That is how sports lovers of the 1960s were remembered — as romantic, fashionable people. In those years and right up to the time of «perestroika» it was not only the GTO norms that uncovered new sporting talents. Sports competitions were held all over the country — spartakiads for schools, universities, factories and republics. The most prestigious of these was the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR. The USSR was also striving (successfully) to be the best in world sport, and everyone in the country played ice hockey, twirled hoops and did push-ups on a high beam in the name of health and so that the country could be proud of its people. It was considered to be a social disgrace for healthy people not to engage in sport in a country whose honour was upheld at the Olympic Games by the likes of Vladislav Tretyak, Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev. Ice hockey players, gymnasts and figure-skaters were heroes of the country along with cosmonauts. People wanted to imitate them, to be like them. Sport was free of charge and encouraged by the state in every possible way. The whole country ran, jumped and went hiking. Downhill skiing became fashionable, and athletic gymnastics made a comeback. Inspired by the film «The Labours of Hercules» Soviet youths began, almost in secret, to lift weights so as to be like their idol. Bodybuilding was now permitted, now banned as a bourgeois sport, but it would make its way to become the most popular amateur sport. In the 1980s the land of victorious socialism became, perhaps, the most sporting country in the world. Everyone engaged in sport. The apogee had been reached. The present day, which can be called the age of fitness centres in amateur sport, takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century in search of analogies. Sport is becoming an individual pursuit — again the fashion for «muscle development» with the help of new technologies, but essentially weights. Eurhythmics are now aerobics. Today, just as 100 years ago, it is not only prosperous people that can call themselves modern, but also stately, well-formed citizens. Endurance and health, needless to say, but above all beauty and shapeliness of figure. The walls of gymnasiums are mirrors. When you look at photographs of our contemporaries, it becomes evident that we are in some ways very similar to those who lived in the early 20th century. But we are not so intense — we still recall the opportunities of combining training sessions with a little flirting that existed in the 1960s. We remember the necessity of knowing how to defend ourselves. The muscles of a bodyguard are being developed methodically before our very eyes. There is something of the 1940s in our static poses in front of the mirror. Fitness is predominant, and possibly even dictates the rules of the game. However, there is something unchangeable in human nature and passions — unchangeable in the way it gladdens our eyes, our imaginations. And inspired images, no matter how long ago they were, are from time to time reborn. They are retained in our genetic memory and we, when necessary, breathe new life into them, thus uniting ages and generations. That memory will always retain the pyramids of acrobats on Red Square, the runs in the forests of Karelia, the climbing of mountains, just as it retains the images of Greco-Roman wrestling a thousand years ago. They all live on in us, and we miss them when we do not see them for a long time. And beautiful images return, bringing with them confidence and peace, since they establish a link between the ages.

2006