Sometimes in college, when I’d go to the rec center, I’d see a surprising lack of sweaty people in grungy clothes.
Instead, what I found – and I know I’m not the only person who’s spotted this, nor is Truman State University the only place where this trend has been observed – were fresh-smelling, matte-faced people in completely dry clothing that coordinated better than my street clothes.
They were athletic, I told myself. I wasn’t. This explanation failed me after college, though, as I became more sporty and as I chatted with even sportier people who stated convincingly that they too became gross while exercising.
Fortunately, artist Sacha Goldberger undertook a project that cleared this conundrum up for me. Last year, he took photos of runners in Bois de Boulogne, a park near Paris, after they’d done a sprint. A week later, he took their photos again, this time when they were cleaned up and coiffed. (You can check them out here.)
Goldberger explained the project to art blog My Modern Met:
“I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society. The difference was very surprising.”
That would’ve been a delightfully self-aggrandizing way of thinking about the great sweat divide when I was in college: “I’m so authentic. They’re all so contrived.” As a much less serious 20something, I’ll still take Goldberger’s premise, but (as he probably meant all along) take it to mean our insides rather than our outsides.
