I know what it looks like already. The body suspended mid leap or run, caught in that freeze frame mythology we’ve all agreed means “transcendence” or “freedom” or whatever bullshit someone is packaging this week. The lighting just so. The composition that genuflects about “liminal space” ever thumbtacked to a corkboard. It’s pornography, really, image making that gets a viewer off by confirming what they already believed before I even clicked the shutter.
The harder thing, the thing that requires me to actually show up with my eyes open and my received wisdom checked at the door, is to see what’s actually happening in that gym. Not the grand gesture. Not the moment that screams “ART” loud enough to drown out the squeak of sneakers on hardwood. But the weird, unresolved stuff happening in the margins. The body not as symbol but as meat and sweat and miscalculation. The space not as backdrop but as active collaborator or antagonist. The lighting that refuses to cooperate with my fantasy about what “should” be happening.This demands fieldwork. Real time logged. I need to know how a dancer’s breathing changes, how the architecture of that specific gym creates acoustic dead zones, how fluorescent tubes hum at a frequency that nobody talks about but everyone feels. I can’t phone that in. I can’t learn it from someone else’s picture or some critical theory I speed read before the shoot.
The photographer as stenographer of consensus, that’s the death I’m trying to avoid. And I’m right to run from it. Because once I start illustrating the agreements we’ve already made about what things mean, I’m just another PR flack for the status quo of perception. I’m confirming the bias, feeding the algorithm of acceptable interpretation.
What takes discipline is staying present when the received idea is whispering in my ear, telling me this is the shot, this is what “dance documentation” looks like. Discipline means knowing the subject well enough to recognize when the actual moment of truth, ugly, inconvenient, resistant to caption, flashes past.
And having the nerve to take that picture instead.