A post from Benjamin Wardell:

I love how difficult it is to capture dance.  I heard a choreographer compare dance to fireworks in that aspect.  It happens in one unique moment and then is left to our memory.  Even when doing the same choreography repeatedly, we can’t help but change the dance each time through our choices, mood, or even our mistakes.

So when it comes time to photograph dance we often come up short.  How do you take something that’s always moving and shifting and lock it into one frame?  So much dance photography ends up somehow flat and stifled.  Instead of preserving the life of a dance, it boils it down to a single moment disconnected from the whole.

So, as a dancer and photographer I’m trying to figure out how to deal with this problem.  There is a central similarity between photography and dance in that they are both very concerned with the relationship of positions to movement.  But in that similarity there can be a disconnect, because photography is often about finding movement in one position and dance is basically about taking many positions and creating movement through them.  Lately, my favorite dance photography finds moments that are only possible when dance and photography come together.  Photos where the camera isn’t just capturing a moment but is opening up possibilities for the dance that cannot exist anywhere except on the film and in the frame.  The photo below is a beautiful example.  It creates a world that is unlike the reality of what it’s capturing, but somewhere in that unreality it finds the essence and maintains the life of the dance work.  That inexplicable place where the two mediums meet is the place I’m always striving to find when I get behind my camera.

I love seeing a dancer having an amazing time doing ballet,red confetti and all. Boston Ballet Dancing Jewels.

An image from The Netherlands Dance Theater.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Laura Halm in motion with black backdrop. This awesome, fluid, colorful, and continually in motion photo was taken by Benjamin Wardell. Check out his site bendwell.com.