Pain I

Espen Rasmussen

douleur pain rasmussen

Un mot sur l'oeuvre

An image taken from Espen Rasmussen’s work on extreme sports. The photos in this montage were all taken a few seconds after finishing the 2012 edition of «The great trial of strength», a 500km cycle race from Trondheim to Oslo in Norway. Each pair of feet tells the story of the athlete and what he endured.

Le témoignage d'Espen Rasmussen

For a year I followed and documented men who take part in this kind of competition, concentrating on their mental and physical pain. How can pain be photographed ? I focused on the physical details that show in concrete terms what can voluntarily be endured by the body. Some athletes couldn’t walk when they got off their bikes, and taking their shoes off for the photo was a real ordeal .

Le choix de Jean-Denis

More suffering, more pain, it has to be tough, sentences delivered like a creed for many extreme sports. Disciplines that are particularly popular with the forty-somethings. With his series « Pain », Esper Rasmussen takes a closer look at this modern phenomenon of pushing the body’s limits, sometimes beyond the reasonable. The work invites the viewer to reflect on what pushes men to inflict this on themselves. Showing and testing their bravery, proving something to themselves, showing their mental and physical strength and existing through it in other people’s eyes and their own. Sport is always partly about all that. Maybe even more so when you reach a pivotal age and would like (physically) to still exist and not yet, not already have become a has been… Not easy to hang on your living room wall, and yet… this image grabs you and stays with you.