Physical culture, posing, and the medium of fitness magazines

Physical culture describes a new socio-political interest in physical activity which emerged in the late nineteenth century and became a global phenomenon. Physical culture was concerned with the ‘commercial and ideological cultivation of the body’, as made manifest in gymnasium and keep fit cultures. This paper focuses specifically on physical culture magazines, which began to be sold with regularity in North America and Europe from the late 1890s, and contributed to the movement’s spread in this period. Publications relied on a reciprocal relationship with their readers to craft their content and remain financially viable. Reader-submitted content, be it images or letters, helped these magazines shape the practices and values of physical culturists. Critically, many of these magazines were transnational in nature, republishing articles and images from other publications and from readers across the world. This article is driven by a two-pronged argument: first, that magazine cover images helped to implicitly inform ways of presenting the male body. Second, that this was a transnational phenomenon. The article discusses the rise of physical culture in Europe before examining two popular physical culture magazines from the early twentieth century, the French magazine La Culture Physique and the English magazine Health and Strength. Using examples of cover images and reader submissions to these two publications, the article demonstrates how the growing mediums of physical culture magazines and photography provided crucial avenues for countless men around the world to re-evaluate their relationships with their bodies.