David Tucker
DANCEWORKS is an ongoing photographic series that explores the relationship between dancer and environment, dancer and dancer, and dancer and self. Collaborating with a diverse variety of modern and ballet dancers, the series focuses on the purity of line, shape, and form of the human body in motion. Dancers have been photographed from San Diego to Seattle, in deserts and dunes, beaches and abandoned buildings, in studios and on city rooftops.
DANCEWORKS celebrates the human body, its strength, its fragility, its athleticism, its ability to communicate through gesture, movement and stillness. The dancers I work with are from an array of ethnic backgrounds, of differing dance styles and vocabulary.
They bring to life images otherwise only imagined.
What is intriguing to me about dance and photography is that these two art forms are contradictory to each other in their basic natures, yet complement one another perfectly.
Photography is essentially a medium of the moment, artistic expression created faster than the eye can blink, and in that fraction of a second, an image is forever fixed. Photography renders the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional form with the potential to exist for hundreds of years to come.
Dance, on the other hand, is an art of fleeting presence, vanishing in almost the same instant of its creation. The creative strengths of dance remain its transitions, movements leading to other movements, its fluidity and inherent sense of musicality. A dancer can articulate their body in the most delicate and athletic ways and in doing so are able to communicate as few others can.
Together these two art forms create visual alchemy: line and shape, movement and stillness, shadow and light, capturing the transitory beauty of one through the mechanical machinations of the other. This combination of dance and photography continues to challenge and inspire.