“My mother looked for the ‘nodes’—the points where she felt thought and purpose and motion in dance came together,” says Doug Morgan. She wanted a moment when the dancer defies gravity. She tried to catch a sense of levitation in her pictures.”
Barbara Morgan felt high-speed flashes from a strobe light (just coming into use in 1940) made pictures too sharp. She preferred that a dancer’s extremities be slightly blurred when caught in motion. She set the focal plane shutter of her Speed Graphic at 1/800th of a second and synchronized it to fire three General Electric #31 focal plane flashbulbs.
“Martha Graham reminisced about the whole day they spent in the 23rd street studio,” says Lloyd Morgan. “She said to mother, ‘You made me do it over and over until we had it right. I got so tired. After each picture, you’d go off and develop the film. I’d just lie down on the floor and take a nap.’”
A fluorescent ceiling light, in the printing plant owned by Morgan’s sons, reflects off the shiny side their mother’s negative of Graham dancing Letter to the World.
John Loengard, Celebrating the Negative is available to museums as a touring exhibition from Curatorial Assistance.
http://www.curatorial.org/traveling-exhibitions#/johnloengard/
Celebrating the Negative
by John Loengard
Released in 1994
Published by Arcade Publishing
http://www.johnloengard.com
