Motion suspended in time

[Images courtesy the Carol Halsted Collection] Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham in Letter to the World, 1941, gelatin silver print.

By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 13, 2003

Movement, strength, passion and personality are captured with the camera's click in an exhibit that also reveals much about two disparate art forms.

ST. PETERSBURG -- In the catalog for "The Power and Passion of Dance," a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, an obvious truth is articulated by David Lyman, dance writer for the Detroit Free Press. He points out that a marriage of photography and dance seems an anomaly; one art form is devoted to arresting motion, the other to liberating it.

Yet many of the 70 images, all part of the famous Carol Halsted Dance Photography Collection, convey within their single-frame format dance's essence -- the heart-stopping levitations, the graceful arabesques and, most interesting, the will of the artists, who stretch their bodies into physical attitudes that defy orthopedic wisdom while making it look effortless and beautiful.

Max Waldman, Judith Jamison in Cry, 1976, gelatin silver print.

The collection is part art, part history and part documentary -- about modern dance and photography. They began at about the same time. The earliest images are from the late 19th century, albumen prints used as promotional handouts of ballerinas from the Paris Opera Ballet who look like black-and-white versions of Degas' dancers. Those and other prints from that era are no more than charming markers of their time.

But just a few years later, E.O. Hoppe, photographing Ballet Russe dancers such as Nijinsky, seemed less interested in documentation and more in presenting the spirit of the individual performer and the psychology of character. A decade further and Edward Steichen, one of the photography-as-art progenitors, was shooting Isadora Duncan in soft-focus amid the columns of the Parthenon, posed as a triumphant goddess. It's a wonder of composition and technique and a revelation of his subject's charisma.

In those early 20th century works by Steichen, Arnold Genthe and Albert Sullivan, for all their romanticism, are the beginnings of modernism, an interest in the abstraction of shape and form. Sullivan's portrait of Ernestine Meyer, a vaudeville ballerina, is a dance of dark and light, curves and angles.

But these men were also interested in taking dance photography beyond portraiture. Genthe's candid 1920s shot of Anna Pavlova conveys a sense of motion. Pavlova does not seem stopped in time but about to leap into the next step, which we anticipate and even visualize.

Barbara Morgan's mid century works, primarily with Martha Graham's company, are the collection's best examples of photography in service to dance. She uses dramatic studio light and a fast shutter speed to enhance the drama of Graham's swirling white skirt against an almost black background, creating a metaphor for the angst of the dancer's subject, poet Emily Dickinson. In an example of creating drama through manipulation of the print, she crops out all but Graham's torso, clad in a sinuous ribbed knit dress, to bisect the field of vision. It's a reinforcement of Graham's style of movement, which emanated from her central section. Graham dancer Erick Hawkins is photographed in natural light at high noon, face raised to the sun, other parts of him in shadow. She shoots the image from below so that he's framed only by clouds and sky, maximizing the physicality of his efforts that put his veins and musculature in high relief.

The process of creation is recorded in a more documentary style, such as the dance lesson George Balanchine conducts at the School of American Ballet in 1959, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Sy Johnson's photograph of a collaboration between Alvin Ailey and Charles Mingus with the Joffrey Ballet in 1971.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Balanchine, 1959, gelatin silver print.

Later 20th century portraits are revelatory in their own ways, showing the egos of the stars who have driven dance, especially American dance, such as Annie Leibovitz's takes on Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mark Morris and Merce Cunningham. In Irving Penn's glamor-drenched print of Balanchine and Maria Tallchief, the couple are almost wedged together between two walls in an intimacy of connection that is part discipline, part passion.

The most riveting photograph is one of Judith Jamison, captured by Max Waldman in a pose fromCry, created for her by Alvin Ailey in 1972. It puts a single moment in one dancer's life within the context of the history of dance photography. Jamison is clothed in a diaphanous white skirt that reveals her powerful legs bent in a plie. Her raised arms, cropped above the elbow, mirror the angles of her thighs and suggest an imminent downward stroke. In this bending and raising, she defies and yields to gravity. The graininess of the print obscures most details, even Jamison's facial features, reducing her truncated body to an essence of form and motion. Like dance, it is intellectual and emotional, a triumph of opposites, the still point in a turning world.

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