A New Golden Age? Part II

PumpItUp: My next pairing is the WPW cover of Lisa Lorio and one of my all-time faves Janet Tech with modern media savvy model-look gym-goddesses Larissa Reis and Oksana Grishina.



FMS: Janet and Lisa wouldn't look out of place in Physique either. In Lisa's case, Figure even. Gorgeous women, utterly exotic and other-worldly at the time I came across them.

PIU: I suppose for me, with Janet especially, it was the facial looks, the lean beauty, the particularly friendly smile. Yes, Lisa is definitely more figure in that cover.

I also remember seeing that issue in my local newsagent (a rarity for the then bi-monthly WPW) and plotting how I could get it discreetly into my sweaty hand and out of the shop. I guess it was always more exciting to see two women on a cover than the woman hanging off the arm of some huge guy.

FMS: Lisa Lorio I remember for one picture where she was wearing nothing but braces on top. And I think that is an example of what is the biggest difference then and now. A single image living long in the memory. In 20 years will anybody recall individual (iconic?) images of Larissa? I doubt it, but given there is so much of her out there it kind of guarantees she will live forever as it were. Lisa, Janet and the other women of that era, I'm not so sure.

Interested why you called Larissa and Oksana "Media savvy", how so?

PIU: I was probably thinking of their product endorsements and affiliations. Like Larissa, she has more than one sponsor and a store linked on her site and some pretty impressive photo shoots and videos around.

FMS: Larissa is certainly a canny businesswoman, out of necessity I imagine given her past.

My next two: (young) Juliette Bergmann & sexy Sophie Arvebrink.



PIU: Juliette is one of the coolest Europeans to grace the Olympia Stage, her Olympia routine to Janet Jackson's "Control" one of the most memorable.



Sophie is one of the new self-promoters with an emphasis on gym workout shots. Has she ever done a shoot for one of the paysites? Would we have ever seen her like in the pre- internet/Instagram age?

FMS: Definitely not. Sophie is totally self-promoting as far as I know. She would have had to compete in the past. You're quite right, we'd have never heard of her.

Juliette was one of the few Europeans who remained based in Europe but made a splash in the States - even in her early days. Incredibly beautiful woman quite apart from the body. Those eyes!

The conversation continues tomorrow...

Dressed in Muscle: Hall of Famer II

JULIETTE BERGMANN

The exotic beauty of Juliette Maria Suzanna Bergmann continues to beguile female muscle fans well over a decade since she retired. One of only three European women to have been Ms Olympia, Juliette was inducted into the (real) IFBB Hall of Fame in 2009, and given her beauty, her achievements, and enduring appeal, I think Juliette is a prime candidate for the (imaginary) FMS Hall of Fame as well.

Some of her glamorous WPW work, especially that off-the-shoulder silver dress was under consideration, and she could easily have made our 241 fest - both this gem of a pic with her bodybuilding sister Liona (top right), and an extremely elegant Juliette with Ludmila Tuboltseva made the shortlist for Tuesday's post.




The research team also came across a couple of terrific candids. Above (bottom right), Juliette shows off a lot of quad in a leopard print number, a pic we had a lot of fun coming up with a caption for. The winner: I'm Never in Such a Hurry that I Haven't Got Time to Flex. And there was also much discussion in the office regarding this candid from (I think) an Awefilms shoot below. Do you think she's just arriving at the pool or is she packed up and leaving? Either way, she couldn't help but cause a stir looking like that. We wondered how the owner of that foot reacted to such a sight.



But in the end it was this set of magazine years scans that got the Hall of Fame nod.



The beauty of the youthful Juliette. A revealing but at the same time rather classy outfit. Those weights "casually" lying around in front of her. The fact that the sofa seems to have been plonked slap bang in the middle of the free weights...



Perhaps every gym should have a sofa like this. Female bodybuilders (only!) could drape themselves over it as Juliette does here, showered and ready to go out and stop traffic again. Of course, there would need to be a photographer on hand at all times to snap all the post-workout glowing and flexing. Good promotional material for the gym. There'd be a queue to sign up that stretched around the block if a young Juliette lookalike was known to be lifting there... And I reckon I'd be in it.

Enjoy!

And check out our other Hall of Fame inductees.

Treasures from the Archive: Ms Olympia Memories: Part I The Magazine Years

Can't say I remember too clearly what it was like having to follow the Ms Olympia a month (or two) after it had actually happened through the pages of Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Ironman and so on, but whenever I come across an image of Cory Everson with a big medal around her neck, flanked by one or both of the Weiders and/or one or both of the women who made up the top three that year, her arms held aloft, it invariably seems familiar, and takes me back to those early magazine years.



Then, as far as my teenage female muscle obsessive self was concerned anyway, the result was a given. The Ms Olympia was not so much a contest as the annual coronation of the most physically perfect woman in the world. And clearly that was Cory.



In those days you were never exactly starved of images of her to drool over (especially in Weider publications), but for me it was the pics of Cory on stage that were always the most drool-worthy, so the Olympia editions were prized possessions. The tan, the oil, the striations, the muscles, and, I particularly remember, the bikini bottoms so tight that I was forced to spend hours, possibly days, of my life just looking (slightly puzzled at that tender age) at whatever was making that shape between her legs!



But, of course, there were other women, and in those very early days Anja Langer was, I reckoned, probably the second most physically perfect woman in the world... The judges didn't see it my way (not for the last time) in 1987 (left, below) when she finished 4th, but in 1988 (right) Anja was runner-up to (of course!) Cory Everson.



These days, I'm convinced that the reason I've found myself reacting so positively to the Physique division (much more positively than I'd expected to when it was first announced) is largely because the aesthetic is so reminiscent of Anja's and the other female bodybuilders' at the time I first discovered my love of female muscle. Over 25 years later, it seems I'm still programmed to respond to this "classical" aesthetic.

And staying in those early years (but not in the sense that it was an image I saw in a magazine), a screencap of Gladys Portugues during her routine at the 1986 Ms Olympia. It was intended for posting earlier in the year when FMS explored The Agony & the Ecstasy experienced by female bodybuilders when prepping and competing.



Now I've seen women (and men) looking this deliriously happy before, but they tended to be in sweaty clubs set up in old railway arches in the late 1990s and all of them had ingested a substance whose effects gave it its name. I doubt Gladys had had any of that, nor that she looked so ecstatic because Jean-Claude had promised to buy her a dog. This is what pure, unadulterated, Olympian female muscle ecstasy looks like!



We return to my formative female muscle lovin' years with three of the most "exotic" (to a teenage boy in a London suburb anyway!) and, therefore, most exciting women I had the pleasure of seeing inside the covers of the magazines containing Olympia reports. Future Ms Olympia Juliette Bergmann (above left) seemed, I recall, almost impossibly beautiful, and was probably responsible for my eagerness to visit Holland - much more so than the more conventional attractions for a young man. Marie-Laure Mahabir (above right) seemed to be from a different planet altogether.



The months when pictures from the Olympia appeared in the magazines tended to be the only ones featuring European-based FBBs like Marie-Laure, and I guess because I had seen so few images of them it made them all the more exciting - they were more memorable because they were so rare. Their placing at the show was utterly irrelevant to me, though perhaps it did cross my mind how such a magnificently sensual creature like Claudia Profanter could possibly finish 14th (as she did in '91).



But while it may have been an advantage to be European to get Swell's attention (or maybe that should be to bring Swell to attention), it was by no means necessary. As my teenage years drew to a close, Denise Rutkowski's feline power and unforgettable gold bikini proved an irresistible combination. And, for the first time in my life, I was, actually, trying to resist the lure of female muscle in order to appear all normal and stuff as I left school and moved away to university.

[Incidentally, if you are the sort who likes to know how the FBBs of your youth are looking now I am honour-bound to warn you that YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT DENISE RUTKOWSKI LOOKS LIKE NOW. I had the misfortune to see, and it is haunting me. Really. Trust me. DON'T.]



And though I regularly fell off the wagon, discovering the likes of Denise, Yolanda Hughes and Natalia Murnikoviene (above, left and right respectively) when I did, I think of that first effort at repressing my desire to view images of female bodybuilders as the end of "The Magazine Years". By the time I re-embraced my sthenolagnia in the late '90s, I didn't need to rely on the mainstream muscle magazines for my fix - there was Women's Physique World and, a bit later, Muscle Elegance. It's rather ironic (and quite fitting) then that I couldn't actually find a magazine scan of Yolanda at the Olympia from a muscle magazine, and instead had to use a WPW pic.

Oh, look! It's Cory winning again...



And I leave you for today with Denise Rutkowski as I would like to remember her, performing her (I think it's fair to say) LEGENDARY routine from 1993. She finished second, and by all accounts that I know of, should have won.

On this evidence, it's easy to see why people would have thought so.

(If you've already got the box of tissues in in preparation for the excitement of this Friday's 2014 meat-fest, now might be a good time to crack them open...)



Enjoy!

More Ms O memories coming soon...

Isn't It Iconic, Don't You Think?

One of you lovely readers, responding to the Women of the Year 2013 post from just before Christmas, commented that 'that first pic [of Alina Popa] could be iconic'.



For some reason, these words stuck in my head. I looked at the pic again, closely. And, yes, I thought to myself, absolutely, it is, indeed 'iconic'. What bothered me though was why. What makes this image, more than the others of Alina in the post, more than all the other countless images of Alina (excepting a handful perhaps), 'iconic' exactly? What, precisely, is an 'iconic' image?

The first port of call was the dictionary, which defined 'iconic' as relating to or of the nature of an icon. OK... So let's look up 'icon' then: 1. An image; a representation. 2. An important and enduring symbol. 3. One who is the object of great attention and devotion; an idol. 4. Computer Science A picture on a screen that represents a specific file, directory, window, option, or program.

Alina is many things, but she's definitely not meaning number four. The other three though, all seemed to fit. But although I felt I now had a better handle on the meaning of the word 'iconic', I still wasn't really any clearer on what makes an 'iconic image'.

I dug a bit deeper.

What I found was that it is generally agreed that to be 'iconic', an image has come to have a symbolic meaning that is readily understood. The image causes people to think about what it represents, rather than what it is. So, when you see Che Guevara, it's violent revolution. Gandhi, and it's peaceful revolution. Einstein with his tongue sticking out is madness and genius in the same place. The Stars and Stripes is whatever the USA means to you. In religion, there's the cross, the crescent, the star of David...

I see...

But now I had a new doubt nagging away at me. Just for the sake of argument, let's say the image of Alina represents something like 'the beauty and strength of the muscular woman'. Well, then isn't it the case that any image of Alina does the same? Isn't it the case then that any image of any muscular woman represents the same thing?

The answer is obviously 'No'. So I'm back to square 1, not really any clearer on why this image strikes us as 'iconic' while others don't. I decided to take a different approach, starting with the image itself. I looked at Chris Zimmerman's image of Alina again (hard though looking at Alina so much was, I really had the bit between my teeth now...)



What I came up with was: 1. It's an image of a woman who, by general consensus is something approaching the epitome of a female bodybuilder, and what's more, she's in absolutely prime condition; 2. The subject, though a female bodybuilder, is not hitting any conventional bodybuilding pose, nor is she wearing the conventional 'uniform' of a female bodybuilder - the posing suit; 3. Zimmerman's style is, it seems to me, (and I say this with no specialised knowledge of photography at all, so I may be completely wrong) all his own - nobody shoots these women quite like he does.

OK, now to test the theory!

1. Does the female bodybuilder in the image have to be at the top of the sport, and does she have to be in prime condition?



When I thought about other iconic images of female bodybuilders, these two sprang to mind immediately. I imagine Bev Francis and her most muscular in her orange posing suit at her biggest and best seems to answer the question in the affirmative. This image of Kim Chizevsky will, I imagine, be a little more controversial, but to me, this is the image of Kim. I don't know why I associate this pose and the black posing suit with her more than any other of the FBB 'icons', but I do.



Having dealt with one era of female bodybuilding, I moved on to Lenda Murray. Choosing one image of her as iconic was, I found, much more challenging because there were so many more candidates. Nevertheless, as I searched through my (not inconsiderable) Lenda archive, for me, this image stood out.

Who else? I thought. Iris, sure, but it's hardly the case that only Ms Olympias or should-have-been Ms Olympias can qualify as icons. I doubt I'll get too much stick if I say I think the two images below are iconic, and Cathey Palyo and Melinda McNabb never came anywhere near being crowned Ms Olympia.



And so I broadened the search to two of my all-time favourites, and, as with Lenda, found myself struggling to find the defining iconic image of either of them!

With Denise Hoshor, I found I could narrow it down to one set of photos, but when trying to pick one from the set as the iconic image of Denise, it proved impossible. And furthermore, as with Lenda, I was aware that other fans might well put forward other sets or shots of Denise as more apt to represent her at her iconic best.




With another of my all-time favourites, Gina Davis, I couldn't even narrow it down to a single set. There are so many top top photos of Gina (I looked at so many goodies while I was trying to choose I did begin to wonder if there was a bad photo of her out there) that the best I could do was make a short list that never got any shorter than the wonderful images below.





So confused had I become that I'd forgotten what the immediate question had been!

Ah! Does the female bodybuilder have to be at her peak and at the top of her sport? From the selection above, I could only surmise the answer was 'yes... maybe'. Bev was a yes, as was Kim. Lenda, it seems to me, had a few peaks at least, and in my iconic image of her, 'The Naked Sleeping Lenda', she certainly wasn't in her contest prime. Neither Palyo nor McNabb were ever at the 'top' of female bodybuilding and in the image I selected Palyo wasn't in prime condition, McNabb absolutely was.

What about the second conclusion I'd drawn from Zimmerman's Alina pic, the point about her not being in a posing suit and not hitting a regulation pose? Again, you can see that, based on the above selections the answer was a rather unsatisfactory 'sometimes, but not always'.

ARRRRRRGH!

Perhaps the third point would prove more fruitful, the point about Zimmerman's style? I perused his Facebook offerings and other pictures of his in my collection. I had to agree with his assertion that he can 'light the shit out of muscular women'. His style is certainly unique among FBB photographers, and there are many many fantastic shots among his body of work.

Are there some female muscle photographers more iconic in their style than others?

Bill Dobbins sprang to mind immediately. Like the image of Bev Francis' most muscular above, one other image I am absolutely certain no one will argue is iconic is the one that adorns the cover of his finest achievement, The Women: Photographs of the Top Female Bodybuilders.



Yes! I thought. Dobbins and Zimmerman, photographers with an 'iconic style', photographers who, through their work, create the iconography of female muscle...

Perhaps there is something there, but at the same time I was sure that it was Women's Physique World that had given us more iconic images than any other source, and neither Dobbins nor Zimmerman had anything to do with that. In fact, I realised that images I would call iconic had been made by a wide variety of photographers and in a wide variety of styles. Square 1 again!

Have you reached any conclusions at all?! I hear you cry.

Well, yes. Sort of. Just bear with me...

The fact that Bill Dobbins' image of Nikki Fuller was a cover made me wonder if that was something that could make an image more likely to become iconic.

Check out these ones of Diana Dennis and Juliette Bergaman...



They're familiar, aren't they?

Well maybe, just maybe, that's because both of them were WPW covers...



And the other thing that did occur to me was that so many of the images I thought of when I tried to conjure up 'iconic images' in my mind were images I had first seen in the magazines in my early female muscle lovin' years. Perhaps it is the case that an image from those days when there were so many fewer images around is so much more likely to be thought of as 'iconic' because almost all female muscle heads of the same generation had almost identical experiences of first seeing them?

Having said that though (he said, indicating the imminent arrival of another unsatisfying conclusion), as with Chris Zimmerman's image of Alina, there are, it seems to me anyway, images that, as the reader who started this whole sorry thought process off said 'could be iconic' being produced now.


Cindy's glistening abs; Anne Freitas' freaky 'Christmas tree'


Gabriela Bankuti by Zoltan Vegh of Fitness Exposure (now there's another female muscle photographer with an 'iconic style'...)

Sorry I haven't really got to the bottom of anything. It might have something to do with the goddess being photographed, the point she's at in her career or her conditioning. It might have something to do with the pose or lack of it, and/or what she's wearing (or not wearing). It might have something to do with the style of the photographer, or how old the image is, or when and where you first came across it...

Perhaps the only conclusion I can reach is that you know an iconic image when you see one! But even so, they are GREAT pictures, aren't they?!

Man, you're probably saying to yourself, this guy has far too much time on his hands! Well, in my defence, I was on holiday. But, yes, OK, I should probably go and get something to eat now.

Enjoy! And I'd love to hear what you think the 'iconic images' of female bodybuilding are. Comment box or 6ft1swell@gmail.com, as always.