Learning to wait for the moment
From 2009 to 2014 I kept a photo blog, “not meant to necessarily show finished work, but merely works in progress.” Reading it again, most of what I still do started there.
The blog has 87 posts, and almost all of them are dance. In 2008 and 2009 I was at Point Park University in Pittsburgh with a camera in nearly every class I could get into: jazz with Kiesha Lalama-White, contemporary with Jason McDole, ballet with Ernie Tolentino, modern with Doug Bentz, and Pearlann Porter’s classes, which were as much about thinking as moving.
The dance classes
The posts from that spring read like a notebook. One day I was working with lines and reflections, the next with expressions, the next with fast shutter speeds. Then I tried something harder: not moving.
“I was trying to force myself to stay in the same place for an elongated period of time during classes and rehearsals, and just see what I could get if I waited for the moment.”THE BLOG, 21 APRIL 2009 · AFTER HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
That rule taught me more than any piece of gear. If you stay in one place long enough, the room starts to come to you.
ARCHIVE NO. 3696
_APJ6714
A summer with Lois Greenfield
In March 2009 I assisted the dance photographer Lois Greenfield at a workshop in New York. Most of the weekend was “throwing fabric and blowing the fan to make the dancers’ hair and clothes make pleasing lines.” I came home and set my shutter to 1/250 of a second for every class after that.
That summer I went back and interned in her studio, near 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, alongside Matt Karas, Yi-Chun Wu and Jack Deaso. Between studio days Yi-Chun and I made our own shoots around the city, trading off who photographed and who assisted: Rio Smith in Washington Square, the dance company I-Danse at the 92nd Street Y with lights lent by Broncolor, and Natalie Lomonte, who had danced with Momix, Pilobolus and Parsons Dance, in the studio with multiple exposures.
I was finding out how much of a dance photograph is decided before the shutter: where the dancer lands in the frame, and where the strobe puts them in time.
The Pillow Project
Back in Pittsburgh, Pearlann Porter’s Pillow Project became the place to try all of it. In 2009 it was the Urban Experiment, dance without walls between the dancers and the people walking by, on parking garages and in Strawberry Way. In 2010 we made a series together with Beth Retas and Kaylin Horgan, styled by Donovan Wilburn: a study of time through light and dance. In 2011 Mike Cooper’s Luminography turned a camera and a projector into an infinite mirror on stage.
Jazz in Pittsburgh
The same spring I started a series on jazz in Pittsburgh: Ben Opie and Colter Harper at the Backstage Bar, Lisa Ferraro and her band, Al Dowe and Etta Cox in Katz Plaza, and Mark Perna playing with Don Aliquo Sr. and Don Aliquo Jr. I am still working with Mark today.
ARCHIVE NO. 7363
ARCHIVE NO. 1735
What stayed
Seventeen years later I am still doing the same thing in a different form. At Thermal Memories I stood in one place for the whole run of the show and let the room come to me, one portrait at a time. The blog was right: none of it was finished work. It was practice.
See the dance photographs, or get in touch about a shoot.