I don’t do second takes. I don’t revisit. The world’s too big, too full of places I haven’t screwed up yet, haven’t disappointed myself in. But La Réunion? La Réunion gets a pass.
First time around, I barely scratched the surface of this French-African-Indian Ocean fever dream floating off Madagascar’s coast. This time, I’m back with LINES Ballet and Robert Rossenwasser, and we’re chasing dancers through rainforests that smell like the earth’s first breath. We’re stupid with ambition, drunk on the impossible: capturing bodies in motion against waterfalls that have been falling since before any of us decided art mattered.
Here’s the thing that breaks my brain: they’re performing Pole Star, and the video projections dancing behind the dancers? I shot those. Years ago. On this same island. So I’m watching my own images… waterfalls, volcanic rock, that particular quality of light that only exists here, made into something larger, folded into choreography, given new life by bodies moving through space. It’s recursive. It’s unsettling. It’s kind of perfect.
And then they showed me the exhibition. Large C prints of my photographs, mounted, framed, hung on actual walls like I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t ready for that gut-punch. You spend your life looking through a viewfinder, and you think you know what you’ve made. Then you see it big, outside yourself, and something shifts. They’re beautiful in a way I didn’t quite believe when I pressed the shutter. Moving, even. Especially the waterfalls, the fog in the mountains. Who knew?
The thing about shooting dancers at elevation, in the clouds, literal clouds rolling through volcanic mountains, is that it’s profoundly idiotic. It’s also transcendent. Watch a perfectly trained human body extend, balance, defy physics on a ridge where the fog is so thick you can’t see three feet ahead, and tell me there’s a god. I dare you.
Between setups, we’re stopping at a banana plantation where the light hits the leaves like Vermeer had a say in it. The dancers stretch against rows of green going on forever, and I’m thinking about colonialism, agriculture, beauty built on complicated histories, the stuff that should make you uncomfortable but instead just is.
I was wrong to think once was enough. Some places demand you come back. Some islands won’t let you leave, not really.
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.
H. P.
