When I have a camera in my hands people also talk to me more on the street also. But I never feel tied to one place as I do when I have my easel and paints out.

Physical exercise that is fun! I love the out-focus whirling in your photos.

For the last five years, my physical exercise has been Yoga which made me getting stronger and limber but I have not reconciled myself with the Yoga culture.

I fled my first Haitha Yoga teacher when she started reading text by her guru Erich Schiffman. I fled my second Iyengar Yoga teacher when, out-of-the-blue, she started preaching about the dichotomy of the brain and mind, the brain being all bad, only useful for remembering telephone numbers. I had stuck with the Iyengar teacher for two years because of her excellent understanding of functional anatomy even though she bored me with her incessant talking none of which had given a hint that she knew anything about the brain. The brain-mind dichotomy must have been something that she had recently picked up from her guru Aadil. Luckily, my present Power Yoga teacher, undoubtedly spiritual, is too sophisticated to make a fool of herself. I enjoy her class, but it is a serious matter for me to keep up while doing half-way decent asanas.

Thus, in my yoga classes, I have not experienced the elation that you photographed in contra dance. Perhaps, this is because I have never done a Yoga retreat. I would be afraid to do so.

Your photos, whatever else is involved, are really about people and motion. The people part, the sense of a communal activity that ramps up joy, is quite strong. The photos seem to me to focus on faces and bodies, even while they are evoking motion. I don’t feel the dance, with its intricate figures and challenges, so much as I feel the joy within the participants.

I suspect that the answer to your question, if you haven’t got it already, will evolve as you choose which photographs you can include in the finite restriction of a book. You aren’t giving us Contra Dancing lessons — no diagrams of foot motions… Nor did I get any sense of a historical overview, or description of various places where dancing is done. What you have are people and motion; the specific form that has those people engaged is almost beside the point.

You also do show yourself in the way some of the photos have the dancers addressing the camera — looking directly at it (at you) with an intent to make you (and then us) smile or laugh or join in the joy. In that sense I think that you are a witness in a somewhat specific sense of the word — not the disembodied observer, but a witness to a meaningful experience — someone who has been there and brought it back to the rest of us.

I don’t see narratives in the link you gave us, but that may evolve also as you arrange and rearrange.

So I see in the bits that I looked at not the _world_ of contra dancing, but people engaging in a furious physical activity that they seem to love and enjoy and want to do more and more of — some of the formal elements of your photography, like the blurred motions, really indicate an on-going, perhaps never stopping, engagement. In other words, I think your eye is telling you more than you have articulated to yourself. Eventually you might have to put it into words, but you’ve already got a definitive take in the pictures.