The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. It’s like trying to photograph music, which is exactly what I’m doing at the Wave Organ because the whole goddamn place IS music, the slap and gurgle of bay water through those pipes creating this ambient soundtrack that sounds like the earth breathing.
These LINES dancers, they’re not just good, they’re operating on some frequency the rest of us can’t access. Alonzo King trains bodies the way other people train racehorses or fighter jets, all precision and power and something that looks effortless precisely because it’s anything but. I’m standing there with my Leica, waiting, and then a dancer extends into some position that seems to defy structural engineering, backlit by that merciless California light bouncing off the Bay, and I either get it or I don’t.
There’s no retry. The moment passes. The wave breaks. The body reforms.
The honest truth? Most of the shots I captured this day are garbage. The light’s too harsh or too flat, I was too early or too late, my focus was off, or the composition is just slightly off in a way that turns poetry into PowerPoint. But then, maybe once every thirty six frames, something happens. The dancer catches air, the light catches the dancer, and you catch both. That’s the shot that makes me forget the salt spray coating your lenses, the way my back’s screaming from contorting yourself into positions almost as ridiculous as the dancers’.
It’s absurd, really, this whole enterprise. Building a sculpture that turns wave sounds into art. Having dancers perform on slippery rocks for an audience of seagulls and fishermen, or a few bewildered tourists who wandered too far from the Marina. Me, standing there trying to freeze the unfreezenable, to make permanent what only matters because it’s ephemeral. But absurdity, it turns out, might be the whole point. The Wave Organ doesn’t make sense. Dance doesn’t make sense. Photography doesn’t make sense. But put them all together on a Tuesday morning with the tide coming in and something happens that transcends sense entirely.
That’s what you’re after. Not beauty, fuck beauty, but truth. The truth of a body moving through space. The truth of light at a specific angle at a specific moment. The truth that all of this, the dance, the photograph, the wave breaking against concrete, exists and then doesn’t, and that’s what makes it matter.
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves