The big picture: Arnie and other Austrian mountains

Photograph by Albert Busek

How does a country boy from the south of Austria rise to become the most famous bodybuilder in the world? The answer, aside from spending endless hours in the gym, is to work hard on burnishing your own image. Over his career, which later took took him to the top ranks of Hollywood and US politics, Arnold Schwarzenegger posed for every camera he could get to point in his direction. Of the countless pictures of him in existence, more than 1,000 have been gathered (with the help of Schwarzenegger’s personal archivist) into a suitably hulking Taschen book on his life, entitled Arnold, now available in a new edition. The photos tell the story of a man who, thanks in no small part to being preternaturally photogenic, made his very wildest dreams come true.

This photograph was taken in 1967 by Albert Busek, who managed the gym in Munich where the 20-year-old Schwarzenegger was working at the time. Busek also edited Sport Revue, a bodybuilding magazine, and had been wowed by Schwarzenegger’s physique and charisma when he met him at a contest two years earlier. “His appearance was overwhelming,” Busek recalled. “[He was] the best athlete at this age I had ever seen.”

“Albert began just devoting his life to making Arnold succeed,” says Dian Hanson, the author of the Taschen book. “He made him a trainer in his gym and began photographing him and putting him on the cover of his magazine.” To facilitate Schwarzenegger’s great dream of making it to the United States, Busek wrote letters to the US bodybuilding impresario Joe Weider foretelling that his friend would become “the Muhammad Ali of bodybuilding”.

Fresh from a Mr Universe victory in England, Schwarzenegger took Busek to Thal, where he’d grown up, and posed for a shoot in the nearby mountains – the muscular young prodigy on his bucolic home turf. “Busek made just one roll of colour photographs to show the magnificence of Arnold’s 20-year-old body, [in part] to manipulate Joe Weider into bringing Arnold to America,” says Hanson. The plan worked: the following year, Schwarzenegger was competing in Weider’s rival Mr Universe contest in Miami. Stardom beckoned. The Austrian hills receded. He never looked back.

Arnold, by Dian Hanson, is published on Friday by Taschen