The Rocky statue stays the same as the Art Museum behind it changes

Can you find the Phanatic in the photo?

He’ll be back, as there’s always next year. The 2026 Spring Training schedule has yet to be announced by Major League Baseball, but Phillies pitchers and catchers generally first report to Clearwater, Florida in mid-February.

Photographing the Phanatic is about as close as I get to covering sports these days.

I also recently spent time with him for one of The Inquirer’s “perfect Philly day” series where the Phanatic — on a rare day to himself — indulged in some simple pleasures: a scrapple sandwich at sunrise, a visit to the Free Library, a quiet walk through the woods, and a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo to see his old homies from the Galápagos Islands: Mommy and Abrazo (really old Western Santa Cruz Galápagos tortoises. Both are around 100!).

Last week I talked about photographing art created by others. This week it was signage about art, as the city’s largest visual arts institution rebranded itself. No longer called the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it will now be known as the Philadelphia Art Museum, or PhAM.

I photographed signs and typography and rolling video displays inside the museum, but I mostly enjoyed hanging out on the east steps watching art lovers and movie-goers doing what they’ve done there for almost five decades, since the triple Oscar-winning movie about the small-time Philly club fighter first came out.

The Rocky statue is just there temporarily, a second casting owned by Sylvester Stallone who loaned it to the city last December for the first RockyFest. The original Rocky statue is also nearby, next to the bottom of the steps. And a third statue might even end up at the airport.

Writer/actor Stallone donated that original Rocky statue created by sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg to the city after he placed it at the top of the museum steps for the filming of Rocky III in 1982.

Back when it was still called the Museum of Art (longer ago than last week) they didn’t want it there, considering it a movie prop, not a work of art. It ended up at the Spectrum, and came back for the filming of Rocky V in 1990. It also returned in 1987 for filming of the movie Mannequin with Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall, and in 1993 for Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. By the time Rocky Balboa (Rocky VI) was filmed in 2006, the statue was in storage. However by then the city’s art commission decided it had withstood the test of time and deserved to return to the museum area where many Rocky fans long wanted it.

Sylvester Stallone attended a public dedication with the mayor, followed by a showing of the first Rocky film on the museum steps.

The previous year writer Michael Vitez and I spent twelve months outside the museum - at all times of day, in all types of weather - interviewing and photographing the disciples who make the pilgrimage to the steps made famous by the fictional film character.

Our book “Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps,” contains 52 vignettes of everyday people who ran up those steps celebrating their own lives, dreams, accomplishments and friendships and for reasons ranging from love to triumph over life-threatening diseases. It was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the movie’s premiere, Nov. 21, 1976.

So this week at the museum steps I knew there would be Rocky Runners, just as there two decades ago (back when there were still only IV Rocky’s).

As Mike Vitez liked to say, “It’s like the ocean; the waves keep crashing on the beach, they never stop.”

All I had to do was be patient and wait. I knew eventually someone would reach the top, make their way to the precise area of my frame on the other side of the museum’s columns, opposite Rocky, and raise their arms...

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: