Featured on PDR in the collection The Turns of the Turnverein: Heinrich Hamann’s Gymnastic Photographs (ca. 1902)

Despite their best efforts to keep still and straight-faced, the young, uniformed bodies in Heinrich Hamann’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein) remain in motion. Girls shaping a human pyramid alternate looks of attentiveness and amusement. Boys performing handstands on parallel bars are flanked by onlookers who smile, fidget, or grimace. A series of images involving inventive uses of the pommel horse — to reenact Don Quixote, to strike tableaux vivants of Romulus and Remus, and, when paired with a bicycle, to play “Texas Yack” (Jack) — allow physical education to decay into silliness. Only the adult gymnasts in these photographs approach the gravity of purpose desired by their coach. One can see in Hamann’s photographs both the playful spontaneity of the…