curated theme
DANCE
Takayuki Nakatake, Hand of Kazuo Ohno, 1999
Imogen Cunningham, Martha Graham Wearing A Crocheted Dress Art Print, 1931
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust.
Xavier Miserachs, Antoñita "La Singla", 1962
Image Courtesy: MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona)
Signed photograph of Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, by Bert, 1913. Valentine Gross Archive, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Alfred Eisenstaedt - LIFE Archives, George Balanchine's School American Ballet (1936)
Leonide Massine’s “Le Tricorne” with sets by Picasso.Credit...Little Steidl
“Ballet,” Brodovitch’s only book, includes 104 pictures — shot in New York in the late 1930s — of the Ballets Russes companies that were formed after Diaghilev’s 1929 death. The poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, whose essay is reprinted in the new edition, wrote, “There are many fine moments that seemed like the bright afterglow of the 30-year-long Diaghilev epic and at the end of an atmosphere in dancing we came to know as Ballets Russes or Russian ballet.” Denby also describes the artistic ambition with which “Ballet” was conceived. Brodovitch, he wrote, “was trying to catch the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has, as the dancers in action created it.” He wanted to render ballet magic in visual terms, Denby added, to show “the unconscious grace and spontaneous animation all through that turns a choreography from a lesson into a dance.”
Source: Philip Gefter, “The Magic of Ballet Captured by a Master’s Camera,” The New York Times, 2025.
A 1940 photograph of Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, dressed for “El Penitente.”
Image Courtesy: Via Martha Graham Dance Company
Ugo Mulas, Trisha Brown nursing her baby after Thanksgiving dinner at Rauschenberg’s studio 1965
Peter Moore, The action in SoHo: Trisha Brown and Carol Goodden performing Brown's “Leaning Duet” on Wooster Street, 1970.
Paul Fusco, Parades and Changes, 1970, performed by San Francisco Dancer's Workshop for the opening of the University Art Museum, Berkeley.
TWYLA THARP: DANCE photographs by Richard Avedon with a text by Thomas Babe
Tea Dance', photograph by Elaine Constantine, from 'SHOWstudio' portfolio, London 2001
Still from Rineke Dijkstra, Marianna (The Fairy Doll), 2014
Rineke Dijkstra, Marianna and Sasha, Kingisepp, Russia, November 2, 2014
Harley Weir, Dancers from Ballet national de Marseille direction (La)Horde wearing 50 years of costume archivee, 2023.
Creative Direction by Alice Gavin, Styling by Laëtitia Gimenez.
Can someone else’s gaze make these movements live again?
Can a sequence of images, color, and rhythm create its own choreography for the eye?
If you have seen dance countless times, could a photobook still make you feel its pulse anew, or even ignite a surprise in how you perceive movement and emotion?
A dancer with weights on her knees, stretching at class, 1960s. Copyright Colin Jones / Topfoto.co.uk
01. Study
Image Credit: Georges Demeny, Fencer, 1906
Courtesy: Met Museum
Chronophotography
DANCE
A source of energy, free from any predictability of origin, slide down and hit the collar bones. Without hesitation, they shoot outwards in an immediate manner and light up the whole arms. Fingers stretch further and become an autonomous expression. Takayuki Nakatake snapped the remarkable long jointed fingers of Kazuo Ohno against the dim light of a rehearsal space in 1999. Step elsewhere.
Takayuki Nakatake, Hand of Kazuo Ohno, 1999
Imogen Cunningham, Martha Graham Wearing A Crocheted Dress Art Print, 1931
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust.
On a hot afternoon, bothered by flies, Martha Graham performed outside the barn at her mother’s home. Imogen Cunningham made nearly ninety photographs that day, extending her earlier studies of plants into the terrain of the human body.
I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements …I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.
- Martha Graham
- Martha Graham
Dance carries a vitality that trespasses time and location. This enigmatic possibility puts generations of photographers under its spell. They keep shooting, moving within the dance of life itself. Yet the exchange does not move in one direction alone. The seductive power of photography also feeds back into the dancer. Kazuo Ohno, for instance, did not mind being photographed at extremely close range during his performances.
Xavier Miserachs, Antoñita "La Singla", 1962
Image Courtesy: MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona)
Signed photograph of Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, by Bert, 1913. Valentine Gross Archive, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Alfred Eisenstaedt - LIFE Archives, George Balanchine's School American Ballet (1936)
Leonide Massine’s “Le Tricorne” with sets by Picasso.Credit...Little Steidl
Source: Philip Gefter, “The Magic of Ballet Captured by a Master’s Camera,” The New York Times, 2025.
The expansion of physical awareness led by dancers could be an enlightening force, setting forth a journey beyond the limits of our ingrained human sensibility. We would imagine a similar phenomenon that happened on the very stage when Alexey Brodovitch was snapping the ballerinas of Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo during their 1935–1937 American tours. Ballet, the landmark photo book was made: The horizontal format, with lateral images from the same scene printed full bleed, creates a cinematic immersion; as the viewer flips the pages, a rhythm emerges, acting as a portal which journeys us not just back to the stage, but into Brodovitch’s own memory of dance.. As Edwin Denby wrote in the accompanying text, “he was not photographing strangers. He was photographing his family; and that is why his pictures have so intimate a tone.”.
A 1940 photograph of Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, dressed for “El Penitente.”
Image Courtesy: Via Martha Graham Dance Company
Ugo Mulas, Trisha Brown nursing her baby after Thanksgiving dinner at Rauschenberg’s studio 1965
Peter Moore, The action in SoHo: Trisha Brown and Carol Goodden performing Brown's “Leaning Duet” on Wooster Street, 1970.
Either off or on stage, multidimensional conversations are in flux between dancers and photographers, even spectators, each speaking in its own intensity and theatricality. This dynamic finds resonance in Estelle Hanania´s collaborative book with Gisele Vienne ¨This Causes Consciousness to Fracture¨. Rich colors and rhythmic sequencing create an immersive experience, inviting the viewer into the pulse of the work. For this Dance issue, we invited Hanania to curate the photobook sections, sharing her personal way of seeing and offering an intimate perspective on the vitality of dance.
Estelle Hanania, This Causes Consciousness to Fracture, Spector Books, 2023.
Paul Fusco, Parades and Changes, 1970, performed by San Francisco Dancer's Workshop for the opening of the University Art Museum, Berkeley.
TWYLA THARP: DANCE photographs by Richard Avedon with a text by Thomas Babe
Tea Dance', photograph by Elaine Constantine, from 'SHOWstudio' portfolio, London 2001
Still from Rineke Dijkstra, Marianna (The Fairy Doll), 2014
Rineke Dijkstra, Marianna and Sasha, Kingisepp, Russia, November 2, 2014
In Marianna, a young ballerina practices The Fairy Doll, taking instructions from her off-camera teacher. As the instructor drills her further and further, for nearly twenty minutes, the girl maintains her resolve and concentration, although as the video reaches its end, she clearly attempts to ward off strain or even frustration from appearing on her face. In the accompanying photograph, the only large-scale one in the exhibition, Marianna and Sasha, Kingisepp, Russia, November 2, 2014, the ballerina and her instructor look directly at the camera, the former maintaining her poise and determination.
Source: Aaron Peck, ¨Rineke Dijkstra’s Captivating Videos Portray the Gestures of Youth¨, Aperture 2023.
Source: Aaron Peck, ¨Rineke Dijkstra’s Captivating Videos Portray the Gestures of Youth¨, Aperture 2023.
Harley Weir, Dancers from Ballet national de Marseille direction (La)Horde wearing 50 years of costume archivee, 2023.
Creative Direction by Alice Gavin, Styling by Laëtitia Gimenez.
Can a sequence of images, color, and rhythm create its own choreography for the eye?
If you have seen dance countless times, could a photobook still make you feel its pulse anew, or even ignite a surprise in how you perceive movement and emotion?
01. Study
Image Credit: Georges Demeny, Fencer, 1906
Courtesy: Met Museum
Chronophotography
Chronophotography is a photographic technique that produces multiple exposures of a moving subject either on a single frame or in rapid succession to record and analyze motion by capturing its successive phases. The core principles of chronophotography revolve around the superposition of images, where multiple exposures are overlaid on one photographic plate to visualize motion's progression, in contrast to sequential separate images that record each phase on distinct plates. This method relies on short exposure times, often as brief as 1/1000 of a second, to freeze individual motion phases without blur, combined with precise timing mechanisms to ensure equal intervals between exposures for accurate decomposition of movement.
Eadweard Muybridge, Plate Number 187. Dancing (fancy), 1887
Source: National Gallery of Art
Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion. Athlete, Standing Leaps, 1879, plate 100 from the series Attitudes of Animals in Motion.
Source: Prodger 2003, p. 137.
Source: Prodger 2003, p. 137.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Analysis of the Flight of a Pigeon by the Chronophotographic Method 1883-87
Image Courtesy: Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel and Moma
A polymorphic scientist, Étienne-Jules Marey (5 March 1830 – 15 May 1904) explored numerous techniques and disciplines, obsessed by one unique concept: movement. First interested in flight, he studied birds and imagined mechanical devices capable of flying. From 1878, he focused on movement within human beings and, inspired by Edward Muybridge he had met in 1881, used photography to document his research.
He thus imagined, in 1882, a camera entitled photographic gun that enabled him to capture a moving subject in twelve poses. Étienne Jules Marey thus decomposed the gestures of men practicing sports, animals in motion, everyday tasks precisely observed and even the migration of air. He also invented the chronophotography that would be the precursor of cinema. Photography in its early days was the ultimate accomplice of reality but with Étienne Jules Marey (and Edward Muybridge), photography suddenly also captured the invisible.
Source: Vintage Everyday
Ottomar Anschütz, Etude du vol de la cigogne, 1884.
Anschütz started making chronophotographs of horses with 12 cameras in 1885, sponsored by the Prussian minister of Culture. He continued the motion studies of horses with 24 cameras under assignment of the Ministry of War at Königlichen Militärreitinstitut (Royal Military Institute) in Hannover during 1886, resulting in over one hundred series of sequential photographs.
Source: Wikipedia
My aim was a static representation of movement, a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting. The reduction of a head in movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible.
- Marcel Duchamp
- Marcel Duchamp
Beyond science, chronophotography profoundly influenced the development of cinema, serving as a precursor to motion pictures through its sequential imaging, and inspired early 20th-century artists, including Futurists and Cubists like Marcel Duchamp in his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). It also laid foundational techniques for modern motion capture, as evidenced by the use of marked suits in films like *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* (2011).
Etienne-Jules Marey, Man Walking, 1890–91
Eadweard Muybridge, Animated sequence of a woman walking downstairs, frames taken by Eadweard Muybridge. Late 19th Century.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
Ernst Kohlrausch, Here are 6 seconds of the ‘Chronophotography’ of Kohlrausch from 1890 of athletes doing jumps, flips and working on the parallel bars, 1890
In the 1890s, this mostly forgotten pioneer of the late pre cinema period made contributions to the development of Chronophotography. His 1st love being athletics blended in nicely with interest in body movements. Ernst Kohlrausch was interested in merging his sequence-images of athletes into a representation of natural motion through projection, however his work is barely cited in contemporary professional photographic publications.
Kohlrausch drifted towards Chronophotography in the late 1880s as a result of his scientific studies into the mechanics of human movements, and the tool that became available to him--Cinematography.
Kohlrausch drifted towards Chronophotography in the late 1880s as a result of his scientific studies into the mechanics of human movements, and the tool that became available to him--Cinematography.
Source: RealPreCinema
Kinokam disc. Both illustrations from the Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, February 1906 (Stephen Herbert Collection).
Source: Source: theoptilogue
Source: theoptilogue
Eadweard J.
Muybridge’s The Attitudes of Animals in Motion is a great example of how photography
changed our understanding of the world, with the ability to capture what the naked eye
cannot see.
Watch the profound impact of photography on scientific research in this film compiled in 1960, from Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering locomotion studies to Etienne-Jules Marey's revolutionary chronophotography.
Fencing Hallucination captures the audience's pose data as an input to the Multilayer Perceptron(MLP), which generates the virtual AI Fencer's pose data. It also uses the audience's pose to synthesize the chronophotograph. The system first represents pose data as stick figures. Then it uses a diffusion model to perform image-to-image translations, converting the stick figures into a series of realistic fencing images. Finally, it combines all images with an additive effect into one image as the result. This multi-step process overcomes the challenge of preserving both the overall motion patterns and fine details when synthesizing a chronophotograph.
02. Listen
Sir Wayne McGregor
by Rick Guest, 2012
Source: NPG
Andrew Nuding, Wayne (styled by Bella Kavanagh) is wearing a leather trench coat and boots by BOTTEGA VENETA for AnOther Magazine, 2023
In this conversation, the British choreographer and director Wayne McGregor returns to a simple but disarming question: what does the body know that the mind does not. Movement appears here not as expression alone, but as a form of thinking that precedes language, something instinctive, continuously adjusting, quietly shaping how we relate to ourselves and others.
To listen is to become aware of this subtle intelligence at work: gestures, habits, hesitations, all carrying their own knowledge. Dance, then, is not only performed it is lived, a way of sensing the world through the body, always in the process of becoming.
To listen is to become aware of this subtle intelligence at work: gestures, habits, hesitations, all carrying their own knowledge. Dance, then, is not only performed it is lived, a way of sensing the world through the body, always in the process of becoming.
Sir Wayne McGregor
by Rick Guest, 2012
Source: NPG
“We are trying to think about how is it that we can move the chemical self to actually inspire somebody else´s chemical self.”
- Wayne McGregor, How To Academy Podcast
- Wayne McGregor, How To Academy Podcast
Andrew Nuding, Wayne (styled by Bella Kavanagh) is wearing a leather trench coat and boots by BOTTEGA VENETA for AnOther Magazine, 2023
03. Read
Dance rarely arrives at a fixed point. It unfolds through gesture, impulse, and discovery, extending a little further each time the body moves. To accompany this issue, we turn to the reflections of Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, whose words offer a rare insight into the inner philosophy of dance — where movement is not a conclusion, but a continuous search.
Speaking as a performer, I feel that a dance born of the moment is never static, it doesn´t end at a particular point, for, in being true to its spontaneus nature, it always needs to explore a little further.
- Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, ¨Kazuo Ohno´s World from Without and Within¨
- Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, ¨Kazuo Ohno´s World from Without and Within¨
04. Photobooks
Dance travels from stage to street, rehearsals to nightlife. We begin with the music-hall elegance of Yvan Dalain, the iconic spreads of Brodovitch’s Ballet, and the intimate explorations of Kazuo Ohno and Eikoh Hosoe. Estelle Hanania’s It´s Alive! à travers de l´oeuvre de Gisèle Vienne published by Shelter Books in 2019 opens the field further, encompassing performances, theatre, teenagehood, free parties, and disco clubs. From there, the selection moves through Chelbin, Choquer, Doury, Konttinen, Miksys, Spencer, Shibuya, Petersen & Oitto, and finally the exuberance of Les Cockettes 1971. Together, these photobooks trace a constellation of dance: formal, social, theatrical, intimate, and vividly alive.
Estelle Hanania is a french photographer.
She is the founder of the publishing house Myriorama.
The “J'aime” series (mainly introducing art and culture) is a photo collection tailored with a compact, yet stylish book design with a compact appearance. The theme of this book is “Music Hall”. Musical performance scenes, artist's practice scenes and dynamic demonstration scenes during the performance, continuous photos where you can enjoy performances and changes in facial expressions, fascinating audience's facial expressions, and a variety of fragmented photos inside and outside the hall where you can feel the taste. A unique book composed of various photos surrounding the hall.
(https://made-in-wonder.com/)
(https://made-in-wonder.com/)
Brodovitch’s aim was to capture dance in the spontaneous, living present. Free of all artistic preconceptions and working with a sense of existential imperative, he immersed himself over a span of five years in the final performances of the Ballets Russes on tour in America. (https://littlesteidl.de/)
Kazuo Ohno loved to be taken photographs. Once, in the rehearsal, he was so content and excited to dance thanks to the very existences of photographers taking him just below the stage. Next day of the performance, though, he was disappointed that it turned out that there were no photographers. This book includes Kazuo Ohno’s photos taken by 42 photographers, such as Eikoh Hosoe, Naoya Ikegami and Nobuyoshi Araki. (http://www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com/)
The eye of Eikoh Hosoe and the body and soul of Kazuo Ohno: This collaboration between two extraordinary artists – realized over a period of more than forty years – is presented here in its entirety.
Surely, the fundamentally human state of freedom that Ohno came to express in his dance could have no better conduit to future generations than the vitally human photography of Hosoe. (https://www.shashasha.co/)
Surely, the fundamentally human state of freedom that Ohno came to express in his dance could have no better conduit to future generations than the vitally human photography of Hosoe. (https://www.shashasha.co/)
The book from French photographer Estelle Hanania and published by Shelter Press, gathers over ten years of collaboration and archives revolving around the artistic universe of Gisèle Vienne. A subjective monography on the choreographer’s work, the present book makes for one of Estelle Hanania’s densest cluster of images to date, arraying a collection of photographs that spans from 2008 to 2019. (https://www.estellehanania.com/)
Chelbin's most frequent subjects are children and adolescents, yet her work encompasses a mix of generations. As Leah Ollman notes, "The atmosphere falls somewhere between public and private. There's a slight titillation of having personal access to performers who, typically, are experienced only remotely. Most immediate, though, are the visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, innocence and experience." (https://store.aperture.org/)
Between 1988 and 1991, photographer Luc Choquer found himself in the turmoil of a country shedding its illusions during Perestroika. As Bernard Frédérik writes, Choquer “incised the entrails of a pathetic everyday life from which, suddenly, a broth of tenderness bursts forth,” capturing a Russia where passion, sometimes jealousy and sometimes revolution, erupts amid pain and provocative joy, and where Russian women and the nation itself confront one another in a fierce transformative moment.
(https://luc-choquer.com/)
(https://luc-choquer.com/)
Artek, Doury takes us to a youth summer recreation camp in Crimea. Established back in 1925, Artek had, once again, become a popular place for the children of privileged families in the post-Soviet era. Starting in 1994 and over a span of ten years, the photographer captured sensitive portraits of a generation in transition from child to adulthood. With a delicate feeling for the fragility of this phase of life, Doury took touching pictures that have lost none of their intimacy. (https://leica-camera.com/)
In Step by Step, photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen traces the lives of mothers and daughters from a dancing school in North Shields. Over a period of seven years she documents their dreams and realities in conversations and photographs.
Andrew Miksys
The discos of Lithuania were once Soviet offices, detention centers, weapons storage, rare Lithuanian mushroom-packing plants... who knows? One can dream of their former incarnations and feel that, no matter how grim, they are being violently shoved into history by the hungry young bodies Andrew photographs.
In 2000, Spencer was commissioned by Graham Rounthwaite at the British music, fashion and culture magazine The Face to create a series focusing on youth clubs across the United Kingdom. From Cornwall to Lancashire, Spencer photographed teenage clubgoers as they drank, danced, and fell in and out of love and lust.
Future Fantasy uses the archive of Vinca Petersen spanning the 1990s to tell the story of an adolescent growing up in a world of contradictions: the traditional expectations of beauty in the modelling industry contrasted with the anarchy and freedom of the illegal rave scene and Vinca’s choice to live on the road. Vinca was signed to IMG Models and worked around the world, and made the highly unusual decision to buy a truck and spend her life travelling with sound systems. (https://antennebooks.com/)
'Every weekend from 1979 until 1982 I photographed the Takenokozoku dancing around the pedestrian zone that opened on Sundays in Harajuku.
They were a group of young people wearing brightly coloured outfits who would dance on Olympic Road. With this photobook I hope to convey something of Japan’s sparkling youth during the 1980s.' Noriko Shibuya
They were a group of young people wearing brightly coloured outfits who would dance on Olympic Road. With this photobook I hope to convey something of Japan’s sparkling youth during the 1980s.' Noriko Shibuya
Clay Geerdes
Rare pamphlet devoted to the avant-garde theater group the Cockettes. Originating from Haight-Ashbury, the cockettes were the pioneers in the glam-rock style mixing eclectic fashion, androgyny, cross-dressing. This book was made for their New York show at the Anderson Theater on the Lower East Side. The photographs could be cut out and the reader could dress the different members of the cockettes according to his tastes. A very interesting account of this band of artists who greatly influenced the cultural life of the early 70s and anticipated the arrival of the Glam style. (https://galeriebabylone.com/)
05. From the Community
We first met Vinca Petersen years ago at Offprint in Paris, alongside Stephen Gill, and recently found ourselves revisiting No System, her photobook published by ditto press. Petersen’s work draws from her own experience within the European free party scene of the 1990s, a period during which she travelled extensively and lived within the communities she photographed.
The images in No System are not made from a distance, but from within, shaped by participation, movement, and shared experience. Moving between moments of gathering, travel, and stillness, the work reflects a way of life structured around music, freedom, and collective rhythm. We reached out to Vinca to include this work in our Community section.
The images in No System are not made from a distance, but from within, shaped by participation, movement, and shared experience. Moving between moments of gathering, travel, and stillness, the work reflects a way of life structured around music, freedom, and collective rhythm. We reached out to Vinca to include this work in our Community section.
Another book by Vinca, Future Fantasy, is also included in Estelle Hanania’s photobook selection for this issue, further extending this shared exploration of dance beyond the stage.
Photographs of the book, No System, Published by Steidl, 1999. Special thanks to Ben Graville.
Courtesy of Vinca Petersen.