Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal.
You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket.
You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.
Patti Smith
These Polaroids of bodies caught mid-leap off Reunion Island’s volcanic rock, they’re not documentation, they’re evidence of a crime against physics. In those original packets you got twenty shots, as Patti Smith says, so each shot becomes a world, and what world is this? It’s the province between what is and what might be, where dancers hang suspended in chemistry and light before gravity reasserts its authority and drags everyone back to earth.
That frontier country, that’s where the real shit happens. It’s not the pirouette and it’s not the photograph. It’s the half-second where the dancer’s weight transfers and the shutter opens and the chemicals start their slow crawl across the film stock, turning light into lie, turning motion into monument. The physical body, all sinew and sweat and the brutal mathematics of momentum, colliding with something else… call it spirit, call it the ineffable, call it whatever lets you sleep at night, but there’s a transaction happening in that space that commerce can’t touch.
Polaroids know this better than any medium. They develop in your hand like a secret revealing itself, unreliable and gorgeous and already dying the moment they exist. Perfect for dance, perfect for that in-between country where artists make their stand. Because what is a dancer but someone who’s decided that being earthbound is negotiable? They’re provincials who’ve set up camp on a border that shouldn’t exist, trafficking in moments that can’t be sustained, building entire careers on the half-second between launch and landing.
The metaphysical isn’t some gauzy abstraction here, it’s as real as ligaments tearing, as concrete as the white border forming around these images while they’re still warm. It’s the space where intention meets execution, where training becomes transcendence, where you stop asking “how did they do that” and start asking “what the hell just happened to physics?” That’s the province. That’s where the artist doesn’t live but exists, perpetually caught between what the body can do and what the spirit demands.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Reunion Island
Polaroid Dance Photographs