Motion in dance photography

Motion and emotion are two elements that can make a photo stand out. Dancing, by definition, involves both of these elements, so it makes an attractive subject for photography.

What makes motion attractive is that it represents something impermanent. Even though the instant is frozen in a static image, the lack of static balance in the dancer’s body implies that this moment is fleeting and therefore precious. Thus, the viewer subconsciously realizes that this photo is an opportunity to observe something that ceased to exist and cannot be recovered. This imbalance, the hint of the impairment nature of the subject is what resonates with the viewer’s emotions. As Allan Watts puts it in his “Wisdom of Insecurity“, “In sculpture, architecture, and painting the finished form stands still, but even so the eye finds pleasure in the form only when it contains a certain lack of symmetry, when, frozen in stone as it may be, it looks as if it were in the midst of motion.”

Incidentally, I generally find “frozen” motion images more appealing and interesting than those with (intentionally) blurred motion. As an engineer, I can speculate that this might be because motion blur implies averaging over time, which is a steady-state component of the motion. The emotional connection with the impermanence of the movement is thus lost in the blurred image.

Recently, I have been working on post-processing of photos that I took during a performance of a local dance school. There was no particular agenda for the photo shoot, i.e. I did not have to capture portraits of all dancers or even cover the entire performance. In that sense, it was the best possible scenario, where I was free to choose what and how to shoot and how many images to deliver.

I found that some types of dances were more photogenic than others. For example, I had far more interesting images of hip-hop than of tap. I think this has to do with the amount of large, exaggerated motion that happens during a articular dance. While hip-hop dancers are almost acrobatic in their movements, the tap performers rarely appear to be out-of-balance at any given instant.