Fotografie und Tanz – Ein intermediales Pas de deux

Meine schriftliche Theorie-Arbeit ist abgeschlossen und liegt nun hier zum Download bereit. Aus der Einleitung:

“Der vorliegende Text soll auf theoretischer Ebene durchdenken, was Tanzfotografie alles beinhaltet oder beinhalten könnte und wo in diesem Feld noch Entwicklungsbedarf besteht. Ausserdem wird ein Versuch unternommen, eine Definition der Tanzfotografie zu erarbeiten.

[...]

Nach einer kurzen Einführung in die Geschichte der Tanzfotografie im ersten Kapitel und ihre Anwendungsbereiche in Kapitel Zwei, wende ich mich in den Kapiteln Drei und Vier dem Hauptaugenmerk zu; der Untersuchung und Definition verschiedener Schnittstellen und Verbindungen zwischen Fotografie und Tanz.
Abschliessend werde ich in der Zusammenfassung die wichtigsten Punkte noch einmal zusammentragen und ein Fazit aus dem erarbeiteten Material ziehen.”

Als PDF (1MB) herunterladen: Fotografie und Tanz – Ein intermediales Pas de deux

A Space Dedicated to Writing

I’m a firm believer in having dedicated workspaces… If you’re trying to write (a paper, book, script, essay etc.) you should have a space — an office, corner, desk, nook, bed, bench, train compartment or tree house — dedicated solely to this purpose. A space where all other activity will be forbidden. Take your computer, nostalgic typewriter or Moleskine notebook to this space, disconnect from Skype, iChat, AOL, MSN and Adium, log-out of Facebook, MySpace and aSmallWorld, turn off your iPhone, Blackberry or regular-ass cell phone, allow the world to miss you — you could even be really brave and disconnect from the internet altogether if it isn’t essential to your research. There you go — now you’re ready.

As for my theory paper — I have found my own little secluded spot to write it in: the Swiss Institute for Art Research’s library, a quiet place with plenty of good books to research in is located in the basement of an old mansion in Zurich’s fancy Seefeld. Don’t look for me.

“The Decisive Moment”

From Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment (1952) in Goldberg 1981: Photography in Print:

“We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

The photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. [...]

Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture — except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the view-finder. You wait and wait, and then finally you press the button — and you depart with the feeling (though you don’t know why) that you’ve really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you’ll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.

Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations…” (p. 385)

Photographic Meaning

From Allan Sekula: On the Invention of Photographic Meaning (1975) in Goldberg 1981: Photography in Print:

“The meaning of a photograph, like that of any other entity, is inevitably subject to cultural definition.” (p.452)

“Photographic ‘literacy’ is learned. And yet, in the real world, the image itself appears ‘natural’ and appropriate, appears to manifest an illusory independence from the matrix of suppositions that determines its readability. Nothing could be more natural than a newspaper photo, or, a man pulling a snapshot from his wallet saying, ‘This is my dog.’ Quite regularly, we are informed that the photograph ‘has its own language,’ is ‘beyond speech,’ is a message of ‘universal significance’ — in short, that photography is a universal and independent language or sign system. Implicit in this argument is the quasi-formalist notion that the photograph derives its semantic properties from conditions that reside within the image itself. But if we accept the fundamental premise that information is the outcome of a culturally determined relationship, then we can no longer ascribe an intrinsic or universal meaning to the photographic image.” (p.454)

“All photographic communication seems to take place within the conditions of a kind of binary folklore. That is, there is a ’symbolist’ folk-myth and a ‘realist’ folk myth. The misleading but popular form of this opposition is ‘art photography’ vs. ‘documentary photography.’ Every photograph tends, at any given moment of reading in any given context, toward one of these two poles of meaning. The oppositions between these two poles are as follows: photographer as seer vs. photographer as witness, photography as expression vs. photography as reportage, theories of imagination (and inner truth) vs. theories of empirical truth, affective value vs. informative value, and finally, metaphoric signification vs. metonymic signification.” (p.472)

“What Makes a Great Dance Photograph?”

These excerpts speak straight to my heart — or mind. If you don’t read the whole (admittedly lengthy) post, be sure to give the last three paragraphs (in black) a read.

From the foreword to Ewing 1987: The Fugitive Gesture:

“What makes a great dance photograph? To the balletomane, a great photograph shows a celebrated ballerina, in classic tutu, performing a flawless arabesque or in seemingly effortless flight, wearing an expression of otherworldly serenity; or, if a male dancer, in muscle-revealing tights and incredible elévation, the very essence of virility. ‘Such a picture’, writes dance photographer Anthony Crickmay, ‘is popular with editors and will . . . always find a public.’

When I began my search for the photographs in this book these were the pictures that balletomanes, dancers and professional dance photographers showed me with enthusiasm. I was more often than not disappointed. [... W]hy should a great dancer automatically make a great dance photograph any more than an exquisite Chanel ensemble automatically makes a great fashion photograph?

[...]

I could sympathize, of course. The dancer’s art is fugitive, leaving nothing of permanence except these fragments, a few hundredths of a second to represent an entire career. Can we blame a dancer for making great demands of them? Even fame cannot confer immortality; as great a name as George Balanchine recognized that photographs were all that would remain of his art in a hundred years.

[...]

But when it came to the expressive aspirations of photographers, [Edwin] Denby had nothing but scorn:

‘A dancer on stage doesn’t look strained and she isn’t a dry, amoeba-shaped blob, a configuration of swirls of cloth and rigid muscles and swollen veins fixed forever in a small square of nothing, like a specimen on a slide. The dancer isolated in the camera field seems to be hanging in a void, in a nowhere.’

And as for depicting movement, there was no sense even trying, for ‘the more painstaking {the movement}, the more pointless the effect. You don’t see the change in the movement, so you don’t see the rhythm, which is dancing.’

It would appear that critics are quite content with photography’s status as handmaiden to the dance. [...]

I believe dance photography to be more than opera glasses, more than a supply of icons, more than a diminished reflection of the dance. At its best it takes on an artistic life of its own; its four sides frame a tiny theatre, it is an independent medium subject to its own laws. Photography may serve the dance without being subservient. Thinking about this independence, I realized that dance photography, no less than dance, can be regarded as a language, with a vocabulary, grammar and syntax. What is more, a true appreciation is only possible within these terms. The iconic and documentary are among these terms, or functions, but by no means exhaust the expressive potential of the language. [...]

And so we return to our initial question: what is a great dance photograph? It seems to me that ultimately a dance photograph must be judged with the same standards as any photograph; that is, no special allowance can be made, no handicap given, for subject matter.

[...]

At some point well into my research I realized that the most dynamic pictures were generally created at the extremes of a continuum: either they were made in intense and sustained collaboration with a dancer or choreographer, or they were made without the dancer’s awareness. But the in-and-out service of the commercial studio photographer was unlikely to produce extraordinary results. As for in-performance pictures and those which resulted from ‘photo calls’, they were even less likely to result in impressive pictures. It is more likely to have been the fiercely independent spirits that have produced the most noteworthy work.” (p. 9–11)

“A Dance Photographer is a Collector of Meaningful Images”

From V. Paul Virtucio: A Dance Photographer is a Collector of Meaningful Images on danzfotog.com, Bloomington (MN) 2004:

“Dance photography is about capturing significant, unrepeatable moments of a fleeting art form. Each performance of a dance work is different from the last because stylised movements are difficult to execute exactly the same way…”

“The biggest choice regarding the content of a dance work that a photographer makes is whether to shoot an intended or a transitional moment. To the untrained eye, those moments are difficult to distinguish. Beginning dance photographers will capture anything interesting to them without any regard for whether the movement was significant or simply preparation for a significant one. However, dancers and veteran dance enthusiasts will know the difference. Sometimes the transitional movements, such as when a dancer is landing from a leap and is about to twirl into another movement across the floor, can be interesting because of the dancer’s facial expression or the shape of the dancer’s body. Other movements are mundane, such as as the first couple steps before a leap with the dancer is simply building momentum. While both might be visually appealing to the photographer, one photograph will have more intrinsic value over another depending the viewer’s dance background.”

“Like in any other kind of photography, you have to earn your subject’s trust to allow them to relax enough to give an honest and sincere performance before your camera. If they’re on edge and more concerned about your presence than about their performance, the quality of the dance work will suffer.”

Full article at danzfotog.com

Thanks once more to Robert for the recommendation.

“The solution [...] is not technical, but conceptual…”

From William A. Ewing: The Fugitive Gesture. Masterpieces of Dance Photography, London 1987:

“The solution to the problem is not technical, but conceptual: photographers have always had the means to convey motion. The issue is not really the ‘capturing’ of it, but the creation of a credible illusion.”

Thanks to Robert for recommending the book and sharing this quote.

No text is ever completely imagined

From Rustom Bharucha: The Politics of Cultural Prctice. Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, Hanover (NH) 2000:

“No text is ever completely imagined in any one production. It can continue to be dreamed in different ways, with different people, at different times.” (p.85)

Reworking the Ballet / The Iconic Status of Swan Lake

From the introduction to Midgelow 2007: Reworking the Ballet:

“While reworkings in dance have become more accepted [...] they are still not as common as they are in theatre, opera, and literature.” (p.1)

“Commonly authors in the field of reworkings have focused upon translations across generic forms – from novel to film, from drama into musical, for example. Discussions around these reworkings have often debated the fidelity between one mode and another, yet these reworkings also encompass other crossings – temporal and geographical.” (p.2)

“[T]he very popularity and visibility (not to mention commercial success) of dances such as Swan Lake, Giselle and The Nutcracker [is pertinent]. Reworkings in many ways rely on, or at least use, an audience’s prior knowledge of the dance which they reference. By using a well-known ballet, references can be mobilised with at least some confidence that an audience will recognise the allusions.” (p.4)

“The ballet Swan Lake is arguably one of the most well-known classical ballets, which has captured the popular imagination and has come to stand as the epitome of all things balletic. Christy Adair similarly writes:

‘ Swan Lake has become synonymous with ballet. The major companies’ productions of this ballet are performed to packed audiences and little-known ballet companies attract audiences when Swan Lake is in their programmes. For many people, the virginal Odette and the whorish Odile are the essence of ballet.’ (Adair 1992:105)

Swan Lake, then, offers an enticing case study both because of the ballet’s canonical and iconic status and on account of the wealth and complexity of the different reworkings that have been staged.” (p.4/5)

“Effektvoll gestaltete Einzelszene” und Intermedialität

Aus Leonhardt 2007: Piktorial-Dramaturgie :

“Als auffällig stellt [Johann N.] Schmidt folgende Gesichtspunkte heraus [...]: Nämlich, dass Aktion und Spektakel auf den Modus ihrer technischen Produktion verweisen, die “effektvoll gestaltete Einzelszene” das Publikum ebenso anspricht wie es die Reihung von Szenen zu einer Geschichte vermag,…” (S.14)

“Intermedialität, [...], bringt von selbst die Bilderfrage ins Spiel. Sie ruft Bilder auf, die wir aus anderen Trägermedien kennen und erinnern, und setzt das Bewusstsein von der Koexistenz oder Rivalität verschiedener Medien voraus. [...] Intermedialtät ist ihrerseits nur eine besondere Spielform in der Interaktion von Bild und Medium.” (S.24)