Dance Photography

When I start doing photography professionally in 1983, I gravitate to auto racing and to ballet.  (Interesting choices, no?)  I follow IMSA and CART cars for one season and realize I will lose my hearing in a year or so.  And I feel like I am taking the same photo over and over again. It plays to my desire to solve problems; "how do they do that?"  Once I learn the slower-shutter pan technique for speeding racers, I am done (and not deaf).

Tracking ballet dancers in a theater performance is a completely different experience.  In 1983, Kodak releases Kodacolor 1000 (ISO) color negative film.  The paradigm shifts. No longer do we have to push tri-x b/w film to the limit to get images of leaping dancers.  I photo Stuart Sebastian (director) with the Dayton Ballet in their studio upstairs at the Victory Theatre.  So begins my love of making images of dance.

It may be the turn of the head, the unnoticed background element, the sun bursting forth at a opportune moment; my goal is to always be ready to see, even if not ready to record.  Sometimes it's best to just watch the rainbow or the sun set.

Black and white is texture, composition, structure and content.  Though once considered the standard for documentation, it is rather, it seems to me, an abstraction.  Negatives afford multiple copies of varying quality.  Digital allows for perfect copies to the conclusion that there is no original.  Simulacra.  Color is emotive, evocative; b/w is cool and calculated.  This isn't about truth or reality.  Those are abstract concepts without referent; there is only perspective based upon where I am standing.

All I ever wanted to be able to do as a photographer is make big color prints.  Now, by virtue of mega-megapixel cameras and a large epson printer, I can create large color images that are astonishing in their clarity and richness.  All in the comfort of my own studio.  All without mediation by lab or by staff.