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The pictures’ rawness and intimacy, which may account for Schwarzenegger’s reticence around publishing the book, are, of course, what make them compelling. (A representative for Schwarzenegger disputed this account.) Schwarzenegger, always moving forward, was not particularly attached to his memories from the era and didn’t understand what was so interesting about the parts of his past before he was fully formed. One of Butler’s most vivid anecdotes is one in which Schwarzenegger, after a world-championship victory, told newspapers based in Graz and Vienna that his consumption of bull testicles had helped him win and, in anticipation of the demand that this would create, arranged to receive from the bull-testicle industry in Austria a cut of its increased profits. As Butler describes in the text of the book, Schwarzenegger-a quintessentially American figure fated to become the Republican governor of California-equates wealth and self-actualization, and is perpetually scheming about where to make his next buck. He looks totally unashamed as he approaches two old women on a park bench, wearing only a pair of bodybuilding briefs, and flexes his arm for their inspection.Īt the beginning of the book, Butler explains that, when he met up with Schwarzenegger to ask permission to assemble the collection, Schwarzenegger, by that point one of the most famous and highly compensated actors in the world, puzzled at why Butler had not, since they had first met, made more of an effort to become rich. But Butler is equally attuned to the uncanniness of how Schwarzenegger moves through the world, a towering figure of boundless energy and impish self-regard. Shots of his face in frenzy, as he lifts the maximum weight his body can handle, tell a gratifying story of pure exertion.

In Butler’s images of Schwarzenegger, who was considered among bodybuilders to have not only the best physique but the best style of posing, there is no shortage of gorgeous studies of the ripples and striations of his muscles and the elegant composition of his form. As a hulking figure who dedicates his life to testing the limits of the human body and will, he has obvious appeal as a subject. In the course of making the “Pumping Iron” book and documentary, Butler and Schwarzenegger formed a more enduring friendship and working relationship, and Butler eventually decided to turn his photos of the young and relatively unvarnished Schwarzenegger into the book “ Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Portrait,” published in 1990. (In one notorious scene, he describes the feeling he gets from each pump of his muscle as akin to orgasm.) Years before his Hollywood career, his celebrity seems predetermined: he radiates an almost terrifying confidence, and it’s clear that he experiences every aspect of his labor as unfettered joy. Olympia, seven times, through some combination of his immaculate physique and the spectacularly ruthless mind games he plays with the other contestants. But even the most intimidating among them become deferential in the presence of the film’s charismatic breakout star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the sport’s highest competition, Mr. Butler, who died in October, 2021, worked with Gaines to make the case for bodybuilding as an underappreciated art form-one that incorporates elements of classical sculpture and dance.īutler and Gaines’s journalistic coverage of the world of bodybuilding led to the 1974 photo book “ Pumping Iron” and a 1977 documentary of the same name, both of which document the sport’s strange and endearing main characters: among others, there is Mike Katz, a gentle teacher and father with an air of diffident sadness that bullies find irresistible Franco Columbu, a docile, but self-assured, former boxing champion from a tiny Italian village and the best bodybuilder under two hundred pounds and Lou Ferrigno, who would go on to play the Incredible Hulk on TV-a massive and slightly bewildered up-and-comer, shepherded through training and competitions by his overbearing father. At the time, the sport was widely denigrated, considered an extreme and unsavory activity for homosexuals and freaks. In the seventies, the photographer George Butler and a collaborator, the journalist Charles Gaines, looking for as yet uncovered subcultures to document for the magazine-reading public, began hanging around with bodybuilders.

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