See them at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/before-and-after-shots-of-jogg. "I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society," Goldberger is quoted as saying. "The difference was very surprising." Surprising how? In that there isn't much of a difference? Anyhow--it's funny, I would never have read his photos that way, and frankly, I think this guy's a bad reader of his own work. The difference between nature and culture...Self-presentation...Really? Is that all the intellect it takes to be a French artist these days? Come on. That's why we in the English biz have something called the intentional fallacy. Just because the artist says he meant something, doesn't mean that his art means what he thinks it means. Besides the implicit Gallic fascination with, and singling out and shaming of, the exercising body, what strikes me about these photos is just how un-brute like all these fleece-swaddled city are anyway, how much a part of their culture the clothing and the gazes of these joggers makes them appear, just how very posed the off-the-shoulder-jacket of the girl above seems.
To show that I am even more pretentious than a French artist, I will one up him by quoting a bona fide rogue French intellectual on running. Here is one of my favorite passages of former rugby player Pierre Bourdieu:
"[A]ll the strictly health-oriented practices such as walking and jogging are also linked in other ways to teh dispositions of the culturally richest fractions of the middle classes and the dominant class...It is therefore understandable that they should find satisfaction in effort itself and to take the deferred gratifications of their present sacrifice at face value. But also, because they can be performed in solitude, at times and in places beyond the reach of the many, off the beaten track, and so exclude all competition (this is one of the differences between running and jogging), they have a natural place among the ethical and aesthetic choices which define the aristocratic asceticism of the dominated fractions of the dominant class" (Distinction, 214).
Upward mobility, effort for its own sake, asceticism: Bourdieu nails the entwinement of some of the main cultural values of endurance sports.
This is cool!!!
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