All images © Lois Greenfield
Cover photo for the World Heart Federation © Lois Greenfield
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| Jennifer Clutterbuck, 2002 |
Since the 1980s, Lois Greenfield’s images have made their indelible
imprint on the world of dance. Her compositions of beautiful bodies
frozen in space are awe-inspiring, and often spark questions like, “How
did the dancers get in that position?” Her work has appeared in
numerous advertising campaigns and editorial spreads, in addition to
many gallery showings. Two monographs of her work are currently
available—Breaking Bounds and Airborne—with a third one on the way.
When Greenfield began taking pictures, she stated, “My dream was to be
a National Geographic
photographer, sparked by my travels and community
service projects.” She photographed a variety of subjects for
alternative newspapers in the Boston area, learning her craft as she
went along. After photographing a dance concert, she set about
mastering the technique of capturing unpredictable movement onstage,
and discovered that she was fascinated with the subject matter. She
moved back to New York City in 1973, and started photographing for The Village Voice. This 20-year relationship became a laboratory to explore new and different ways to photograph dance. On assignment for The Voice in
1982, she met and photographed dancers David Parsons and Daniel Ezralow
with exciting results. This ground-breaking collaboration convinced
Greenfield that she preferred the ability to “shape and refine the
moment
as a photograph,” rather than simply document what was on stage.
“I tell my dancers to leave their choreography at the door,” she
explains. And her photographs are all single images—in other words, she
never recombines the figures, nor does she use Adobe Photoshop—as many
people
assume.
Double Exposure: When did you first become interested in photography?
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| Andrew Pacho, 1999 |
Lois Greenfield:
I became interested in photography in my freshman year of college,
1966. That summer, I volunteered for a community service project in
South America and took pictures with an inexpensive camera (which was a
step up from the Brownie I used in high school)! I trained my lens on
Indians in Ecuador, fueled also by my interest in anthropology, which
became my major in college. I expected to be an ethnographic filmmaker
but became a photojournalist instead. After graduation, my
interest in other cultures was translated into travel photography.
DE: Where did you go to school?
LG: Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
DE: I read that at one time, you photographed dance performances. What made you decide to photograph dancers in your studio?
LG: I started photographing dance on assignment for the newspapers I
was working for. I had no interest in dance at the time, but soon
discovered that I enjoyed shooting dance as much as the riots and rock
stars of the early 70s. But it was very frustrating to work during
dress rehearsals for many reasons. The lighting was always changing,
and it was usually too dark to get good results. Secondly, the dancers
weren’t always in costume or dancing full out. Thirdly, you had to
jostle for position with a phalanx of other photographers and hope you
wouldn’t run out of film during the most exciting part of the dance!
Those frustrations aside, I wasn’t happy merely documenting someone
else’s art form. I became increasingly curious about the expressive
potential of movement, wanted to control the lighting with the use of
strobes, and reshape the choreography. I hadn’t ever studied
photography, so I just started playing around. This gave way to total
improvisation in the studio, and composing images that could only exist
as a photograph.
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| Ashley Roland, Daniel Ezralow, Flipper Hope and Jack Gallagher, 1993 |
DE: Who were your early influences?
LG:
Since I had no prior interest in dance when I started photographing
it, I had never explored the history of dance photography. My first
exposure to a dance photographer was Barbara Morgan. I was intrigued by
her work because she extracted Martha Graham and her dancers from a
theatrical context, and photographed them in a photo studio. I liked
the way the costumes would reveal the arc of the dancer’s movement.
I find myself using fabrics in my photos for the same reason: The
swirls of billowing fabric is not only angelic, it depicts the passage
of time itself. Dance is the ostensible subject of my work, but the
subtext is time. The dancers give form to the passage of time and the
camera allows us to extract 1/2000 of a second from that continuum.
With Max Waldman, I was influenced by the way he used pronounced
photographic grain as a dramatic element within the picture, as though
his actors and dancers couldn’t extricate themselves from it. He united
the medium of photography with its subject—in his case, theater. In my
early work, I used the black frame (the negative's actual border), to
interact dramatically with my subjects. Their improvisations play off
the frame as though it were a real container. The frame often confines
or radically crops them to imply entrances, exits and off-screen space.
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| Daniel Ezralow and Ashley Roland/Iso Dance Company, 1989 |
Lastly—but most importantly—is Duane Michals. I was drawn to the way he
made the unexpected happen in his photographs; such as having people
gradually dissolve into blurs. He was more interested in the emotional
resonance of an event than in the event itself. He didn’t rely on the
fixed moment—he would integrate the present with the past, juxtapose
the dream with the reality, and speculate on the future at the same
time. It was actually as much his philosophy as his work that inspired
me. When I just out of college, I went to hear him speak at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this iconoclastic lecture he
said to a crowd of Minor White/Zone System enthusiasts, “If all your
life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but
I want to create something that would not have existed without me.”
Voilà.
DE: Tell us about photographing motion. How do you know when to click the shutter?
LG: In dance photography, if you see the moment, you’ve missed it!
I always anticipate the moment. There are no rules for this; it’s a
matter of instinct. It’s actually easy to teach someone how to capture
the “peak
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| Maureen Fleming, 2001 |
moment.” What often interests me more, however, are the split
seconds before or after the so-called “peak.” There are very subtle
emotional nuances in these micro-moments. A dancer going up, for
example, connotes striving, whereas coming down suggests release. A
completely different narrative can emerge from the same series of
jumps, depending on the timing. I am fascinated by these subtleties.
DE: What camera equipment do you use?
LG:
I use a Hasselblad 500c/m camera body, with no motor drive or image
reverser. My favorite lenses are the 120mm and 150mm. My strobes
are Broncolor, primarily because I can set the flash duration to 1/2000
of a second or greater. To get crystal-sharp images, the duration of
the flash is much more critical than the camera's shutter speed. I use
a Leaf Valeo
22i digital back on my Hasselblad. When I convert a Leaf Mosaic file to
black-and-white, the tonal range of the converted image equals that of
film. The Leaf back also has the quickest recycle time, so I can shoot
rapidly as the dancers improvise.
DE: Do you photograph models, dancers, or both?
LG: Both, depending on the job. For most part, models can’t do what my dancers can.
DE: Who are your clients?
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| Arthur Aviles, 1996 |
LG: Besides dance companies and Broadway theater shows, I do
advertising for pharmaceutical and commercial clients such as Sony,
Pepsi, Epson, AT&T, and IBM, Xerox, Rolex, etc., and editorial work
for Elle, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue, among others.
DE: Any upcoming workshops or seminars?
LG:
Yes, over a few weekends in late March, 2006, I will host some small
workshops, limited to about eight people in my NYC studio. The
participants
will use my equipment and professional dancers, and I will guide them
through my techniques. My co-teacher is Jack Deaso, who has been my
creative partner for over 20 years. For more information, visit
http://www.loisgreenfield.com/events/workshops.html
DE: What projects are you currently working on?
LG: Besides my regular jobs, shoots and exhibits, I am collecting
images for my third monograph. I am also doing stills (blurs too!) for
“In the Blood,” an
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| Tiler Peck for Bunheads, 2005 |
art/dance
film about boxing by Jodi Kaplan. My
stills will be sequenced into scenes, enhancing the filmed action by
freezing moments in time within the fight sequences. The most exciting
project I am working on at the moment is my
collaboration with the Australian Dance Theatre in “Held,” in which I
shoot the performance from the stage itself, and the images are
transmitted real-time onto two projection screens, so the audience sees
the dance and its representation virtually simultaneously. The
conceptual framework for "Held" was developed with my collaborator,
Henry Jesionka
To View A Gallery of Lois Greenfield's Images, Click Here
The choreography began with a photo shoot in Adelaide, Australia. I had
never worked with the company before and just created shots in my usual
improvisational and collaborative way. Garry Stewart, the
choreographer, then created the dance to include moments similar to the
shots I took. Then frankly, all hell broke loose, as I found myself on
stage during the show with digital SLRs, following the action and
zooming in and out like I hadn’t done in 20 years! To make it even more
terrifying, every image I shoot appears within seconds on the two
screens. There are photographic surprises too, with one “stroboscopic”
scene and another where I walk around with a 200mm lens, shooting
extremely close-up body parts as the dancers writhe around. We’ve
performed it in Sydney, NYC, and Paris, among other locations. I will
be on tour with them (Japan, Europe, and perhaps India next fall). For
more info, please check out the “Held” section on the events page of my
website: http://www.loisgreenfield.com/events/index.html
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| (Left) Maureen Fleming, (Right) Sumayah McRae, 2004 |
Here are some words that describe “Held’s” conceptual framework:
This is the first time the inner processes of photography are
“dramatized” in the context of a choreographed dance piece. The
performance touches on the materials, methods and optics of photography
and its time-altering alchemy. By stopping time, a split-second becomes
an eternity. Ironically, freezing a split-second gives the movement
more solidity than it had as a fleeting gesture of dance. We know
nothing in the real world can exist in two dimensions, yet photographs
seduce us into believing that it is a valid representation of reality.
We end up convinced we “saw” what the photographs depict, even though
it was beyond the threshold of perception.
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| Tony Bennett/Steppin' Out |
DE: Do you photograph any other subjects aside from people?
LG: I’m currently intrigued by a long-standing obsession with reflections (in the real world, not the studio!)
DE: What are your future plans?
LG: I’ve embarked on a feature film project with Jodi Kaplan, exploring
ritual dance around the world. It won’t be a documentary, but rather,
an anthropologically inspired art film. Between this film and “Held,”
I’ve returned to my roots in both stage photojournalism and
ethnographic filmmaking—or, as we would phrase it today—making films
about indigenous cultures.
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