Now back to the naked pictures (hooray!). The appeal of ESPN’s “Body Issue” is that it’s complicated. It doesn’t offer easy images. Captured in these photos are more than the girls of your dreams or hunky beefcakes. The harnessed energy and subtle, sometimes inscrutable emotions expressed not only in their faces but in the contours of their bodies recall why nudes inspired the great masters of painting and sculpture. Like Graham, Michelangelo and Raphael knew that beauty, science and truth reside in the human body.
Some of the magazine’s photos channel classic ideals of perfection and industry. Solo is one of four cover models; another is Blake Griffin of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. In a nod to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” drawing, as well as the myth of Atlas holding up the heavens, Griffin stands inside a great hoop, gripping its top edge as if under strain. We see his bulging thighs in profile, but his waist twists to show us the full expanse of his chest and arms. Surely the sand dunes of the Sahara don’t undulate more than those muscles rolling from elbow to elbow.
More complex is the photo of a modern-day Discobolus, with discus thrower Jeremy Campbell in the torqued, bent-over stance of the famous ancient Greek sculpture. Campbell’s arms are splayed as if ready for flight; you can feel the spiraling rhythm in his upper body that’s about to send him whirling — and it’s both a paradox and a non-issue that that beautiful body is braced on a polished prosthetic leg, a piece of modern art in its own right.
When he played high school football, the Paralympic gold medalist says in the caption, “guys thought it was cool to grab at me in the pile and yell, ‘Pull his leg off!’ . . . But all athletes have bumps and bruises.”
In an interview last week, ESPN magazine editor-in-chief Chad Millman said he hoped this issue “opens people’s eyes to the way athletes look and how they feel about themselves. . . . It shows their vulnerability,” he said. “It also shows their confidence in a way that, it’s not a braggart, I-can-beat-you confidence, but it’s ‘I recognize who I am and what I have and I’ve worked very hard to get it.’ ”
Six-foot-6 Sylvia Fowles of the WNBA, shown glistening, sphinxlike, in a push-up on a desert plateau: “I’m kind of bionic.”
Solo, in a second photo on a suburban lawn like Michelangelo’s nonchalant David, with a watering hose wrapped around hamstrings of heroic proportions: “My entire purpose is trying to be the best, and if that exudes beauty too, that’s pretty powerful. It means the image of the typical female body type is finally evolving.”
Through the palpable energy of these images, we, too, can feel that confidence, that honesty, that enhanced vitality. Now that’s sexy.
Loading...
Comments