Motion captured: five of the best dance photographs

Photography created a revolution in the recording of dance. Before its advent, the history of the art form was mediated through the highly coloured accounts of critics or the stylised images of painters. It was only after the very first, stiff experiments with daguerreotypes in the mid-19th century that we began to accumulate evidence of how dancers actually looked to their contemporaries.

Production shots from the Mariinsky theatre in St Petersburg, dated around 1900, provide detailed evidence of the weightily decorative costumes and scenic opulence with which the Petipa–Ivanov classics were staged. Individual portraits of dancers (many of which were mass produced as collectible postcards), tell us much about the body types, the personalities and the stage presence of the era’s stars.

Still, for many decades the technology of photography remained inimical to dance. Even with the advent of electric lighting, portable cameras and sensitive film it was necessary for dancers to pose, immobile, for several seconds during each shot. Individual photographers might produce remarkable images from these conditions, Baron Adolph de Meyer’s photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky captured the weight, the plasticity, the physical effect of the dancer’s body to a wonderful degree. But it wasn’t until the late 1920s that pioneers such as Dresden photographer Charlotte Rudolph started to get their subjects actually dancing through a photo shoot. From that point, photography developed its own dynamic relationship with dance, with each new advance in technology and each new generation of photographers evolving different ways to capture the fleeting mark that is made by a body in space. Today’s sophisticated equipment allows photographers to create magical, deceptive, transforming effects, as in this sequence of strobing, sci-fi-like images by Rick Guest. Here are five classic examples of how dance photography has progressed during the last hundred years.
 Martha Graham

Lamentation, shot by Barbara Morgan for her 1941 book Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs
Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham met in 1935 and it took six years for the former (“a terror” in the studio, according to Graham) to produce the 16 photographs in this collection. In her determination to get at the core of the dance, to what she called “its spiritual energy”, Morgan had Graham perform the same movements over and over again, allowing her to lie down when she was tired, but always insisting that she remove her costume in case it got dirty. The sessions were endurance tests for both women, but Morgan, with her favourite Speed Graphic camera “pressed to cheekbone and eye socket” as she recalled, produced some of the greatest dance photographs ever made.

For Lamentation, Graham wore a concealing tube of jersey fabric, but Morgan’s dramatic use of light made it expressive in its own right, the pleating and stretch of the material highlighting the fierce zigzag of Graham’s body. It’s the lighting, too, that dramatises the pleading expression on Graham’s averted face, the intensity of her clutched hands, the delicate bones of her feet. But the power of this image is also in the timing: as beautifully composed and cropped as the shot is, it captures the drama of the moment, as Graham’s outstretched body is caught, off-kilter, between stillness and fall.
Beryl Grey

In 1947, as the Black Queen in Ninette de Valois’s ballet Checkmate. Photographed by Gordon Anthony
What Gordon Anthony most wanted to be was a dancer, but having had his ambitions frowned on, he compensated by accompanying his sister (who became Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet) to her ballet classes and teaching himself to photograph what he saw. By the late 1930s, Anthony became one of the leading chroniclers of British ballet, evolving a dramatically expressionist, chiaroscuro style that captured the theatricality of his subject. In this 1947 shot, the device of placing Grey against her own exaggerated shadow was one that Anthony might have borrowed from the fashion photographer Horst. It also recalled the filmic effects of Disney and Hitchcock. But it is brilliantly specific here, mimicking the Black Queen’s malevolent dominance of the stage within the actual ballet (Checkmate), and heightening the dynamic play of lines made by Grey’s body. The movement is De Valois’s and it is embodied by Grey, but it is Anthony’s compositional flair that makes us see the visual correspondence between the two down-thrust daggers and the steely angle of Grey’s lifted knee; his special trick of light that makes the evil, watchful glint of her eyes the focal centre of the shot.
Merce Cunningham Company

In Quartet, shot by JoAnn Baker in 1986
Photographing a group is a different task from shooting a solo dancer – there are more bodies to orchestrate, different issues of composition to consider. JoAnn Baker was not a specialist dance photographer when she took this shot of Merce Cunningham’s masterly late work Quartet, but she came very close to capturing its essence. The fleet, fastidious complexity of the work’s formal logic is encapsulated in this one moment: in the play of line and weight that moves from the women’s high attitude balances down to the deep flattened plié of the man on the right and then upwards to his tilted face. But the shot’s centre of gravitas is Cunningham, and Baker captures him beautifully.

This was almost the last work in which Cunningham, then suffering from arthritis, ever performed. Baker’s camera faithfully records the great man’s frailty, his body subtly less sure on its feet than those of the others, the hint of a ravaged darkness behind his eyes. Yet in this image we can also see the quivering intelligent life of his body, the emphasis with which each detail communicates with the other dancers, the lift in his foot answering to the lift of the woman’s legs, the sideways tilt of his body a spatial nod to the other, younger, man. Cunningham created abstract works, yet as a performer he had a uniquely expressive presence – and Baker captures the almost Lear-like poignancy of this piece, the sense that Cunningham as a choreographer was still master of his dancers, yet feeling the pain of having to yield to their youth.
Yolande Snaith and Cathy Crick

Can Baby Jane Can Can, 1987, photographed by Chris Nash
Chris Nash came of age as a photographer during the 1980s, when British dance was undergoing a rapid transition into postmodernism, and when pure dance was morphing into theatre and performance art. His photography often sought to replicate the eclecticism of the period, manipulating his shots, post-production, to create surrealist collages or visual puns that elaborated the narrative of the original choreography. Can Baby Jane Can Can was a duet, in which Yolande Snaith and Cathy Crick explored the imagery of female friendship, using props and costumes to show women at different ages and at different points in history.

In this shot, the two women are heroines of the second world war. Dressed in utility tweeds, they are captured in the same movement, best feet forward, wielding their tin cans like ration-book trophies. Placing the women in the same pose, Nash’s composition evokes so much about their shared style, their briskness, their intimacy, their very non-sexualised femaleness. The stroke of genius is the background, the enlarged tin cans that form a pattern behind the two women. With their gleaming metallic finish, their exaggerated grooves and curves, these humble household objects have been stylised into weapons of war, that visual propaganda trope of Pathé newsreels and 1940s posters.
Jazz dancers, Dingwalls, London

Shot by Adam Friedman, 1989
Reportage is another crucial strand of dance photography. An entire subgenre has developed around shots of dancers waiting in the wings, stretching in class and ministering to blistered feet. In this 1989 photograph, though, it is ordinary dancers, clubbers, who are Adam Friedman’s subject, and it is two ordinary guys who embody one of the most viscerally ecstatic dance images I’ve seen. In the foregrounded dancer, who’s swinging his way towards the camera, the exhilarating twist of the body is magnified by the swing of his jacket, the rakish lift of his tie. But with his eyes shut, his mouth slack, his hands almost floating in space, the dancer also seems transported to a state of pure emotion.

I love the way that the expansiveness of this dancer is contrasted with the smaller figure behind – concentrating on his own moves, he has a more brittle, jangling energy. I love, too, the way that the men’s absorption in the music and the moment is contrasted with the bright watchfulness of the man with his back to the wall, the young woman drinking on the sidelines.

The heat, the noise, the sweat, the thickness of the atmosphere are all so powerful in Friedman’s shot. In its own way, it’s as much about “the spiritual energy of dance”, as Barbara Morgan’s classic images of Martha Graham.

Resource: http://www.theguardian.com