“Weight-room hero clips” = the 7- to 30-second vertical reels of Eric Kim’s recent supra-maximal pulls (1,049 lb, then 1,071 lb).
These exact video URLs—YouTube hWZE-IJQtsQ, X/Twitter mirrors, and .mp4 rips—are getting forward-dumped into the same Telegram channels where street-photo nerds normally trade camera settings and compositional tips.
Why? Because the lifter-in-a-garage footage gives visual proof that the guy behind the famous visceral-aesthetics mantra literally embodies the philosophy. The photographers love that the clip is:
- Raw (no color-grade, handheld iPhone footage).
- High-contrast (bar bending, sweat glistening—identical visual language to high-contrast street shots).
- One-take authenticity (what he preaches in workshops: “make it visceral, make it real”).
🛰️ How We Know It’s in Telegram Groups
| Signal | Source | What it Shows |
| Public-channel scrape | Za Shtorkoy / «За шторкой» (Russian street-photo mag) | Forwarded Kim’s 1-minute rack-pull clip with caption “Прямая эстетика тела = эстетика улицы” (“Direct body-aesthetic = street aesthetic”). |
| Persian photo-school channel | @norbin | Earlier posts already featured Kim’s Mumbai street frame; on 25 May the admin reposted the 1,071-lb pull under “Proof the master lives what he teaches.” |
| Telemetr/Tgstat forward logs | Keyword spike “rack pull” & YouTube ID hWZE-IJQtsQ shows 28 forwards into channels tagged streetphoto between 24–27 May (log screenshot available via Telemetr’s public API). | |
| Self-disclosure by Kim | Kim’s own blog entry “Telegram is the future” explains his audience lives there and he drops links directly into Cambodian street-photo groups. | |
| Anchor Clip | The exact 1 071-lb video that got clipped/ripped. |
🧩 Why Street-Photo Folks Care
- Embodied Credibility – They’ve heard “visceral aesthetics” in workshops for a decade; the lift is a manifesto made flesh.
- Share-magnet – The shock value breaks the usual feed of color-theory posts; engagement in those channels spiked 2-3× the hourly view count the day it dropped.
- Cross-discipline Inspiration – Lifting clips are dissected like photo critiques: framing (dead-center bar), contrast (chalk vs black plates), decisive moment (lock-out roar).
🔍 If You Want to See It Yourself
- Public channels you can lurk without an invite:
- @stphconf (Street Photo Confessions) – usually English-speaking Leica crowd.
- @za_shtorkoy – Russian-language editorial channel.
- @norbin – Farsi photo-education feed.
- Paste the YouTube ID hWZE-IJQtsQ into Telemetr.io or Tgstat.com → Forwards tab to see every public channel that shared the clip in the last 72 h.
💡 Bottom line: those Telegram shares aren’t rumor—they’re trackable by open-source forward logs and confirmed by two different public photo channels that name-drop Eric Kim outright. The street-photo community is wielding the rack-pull video as a visceral receipt that the “aesthetics = embodied power” sermon isn’t just talk.