I am travelling in New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.
Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?
Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expresion, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.
This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality, there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.
To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.
My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.
I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.
Your solution to the witness/participant problem of flitting back and forth seems fine to me. At least you’re not photographing a famine or war zone where there are ethical issues. The related but distinct question of what you want this book to be, nicely posed by Millstone, will take some harder thought. It involves not only what kind of photographs you want to take, but also how much you care about describing the subculture to others and how broad an audience you want to have. Have you thought about collaborating with a writer? Anyway, good luck with it!
Doug,
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.
Doug,
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.
Interesting conflict between being a witness or a participant. When I paint landscapes I often have people coming up to me to chat. It’s interesting for me because I don’t normally chat with random strangers that often (usually my head is in the clouds, probably thinking about my next post on Art & Perception or something like that). Creating in public as a painter is in this way very different from photography. I never paint landscapes with the intention of interacting with people, but I think the people do have an influence on the work — which is always something to be turned in a positive direction.
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.