Photo essay Photojournalism

The magazine of the photo-essay

September 2018 issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

by Lois Greenfield

Moving Still

I am interested in the spontaneous act of creating images without forethought. My starting point is in the form of a question - “What if…”. If I knew what the finished picture would look like I wouldn’t bother to shoot it, as my interest in this process is to get beyond my imagination, not document an already formulated idea. I am on a quest for a perfect moment- in which the conjunction of the dancer’s movement, expression and gesture becomes part of in an enigmatic scenario, often involving reflective surfaces, fabrics and assorted elements that we throw into the set. The point is never to have the viewer figure out what is going on in the photo, but just to present the mystery of that instant. The moments I look for are the opposite of performed dance. I look to capture the dancer’s dream, hiding in a split second. All my pictures are taken as single image, in-camera photographs. I never recombine or rearrange the figures within my images. Their veracity as documents gives the photographs their mystery, as well as the fact

that the split seconds that I capture are beneath the threshold of human perception. My photographs are meant to frame contradictions, present the impossible, and find a coherence within chaos.