Lois Greenfield: Moving Still

In her third monograph, dance photographer Lois Greenfield captures the beauty and form of the dancers. This collection is one that will be appreciated by lovers of dance or photography—surveys Greenfield’s creative output across the last two decades, and includes her entry into color photography. A monograph celebrating the signature gravity-defying images from one of the world’s most accomplished and respected photographers, Lois Greenfield: Moving Still expresses the artistic possibilities of contemporary dance reflected through an inimitable lens.

“How do we depict time?
Can time be illustrated without something visible changing?

I can sit at the computer for hours, while the sun comes up or goes down , while I get hungrier or more tired., but I am still just sitting here , seemingly exempt from the passage of time.

Or I can experience time by my activities – the different places I pass through, the meetings I have, the conversations, the photoshoots … then I truly experience the passage of time, understanding my day from morning to night, and it makes sense to me. But at my desk, time doesn’t pass, it is one long moment that can last all day.

This obsession with time, something I never felt I have enough of, has led me to my most recent photographic exploration , a series entitled “One to One”. The photographs in this portfolio are from my newest series, which comprises one third of the photographs in my new book, Lois:Greenfield: Moving Still, Published by Thames & Hudson, UK and Chronicle Books, US

For the past 40 years, my area of inquiry has been to split time into photographic particles of 1/2000 of a second, revealing moments beneath the threshold of perception.

What better subject could I have than dancers? Their movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. Through the alchemy of photography time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.

In my first two books, Breaking Bounds (1992) and Airborne (1998), my inquiry was often about a movement in its pull against gravity, or the opposite – the liberation from gravity, with the figures floating, weightless. I invited dancers to ignore the constraints of choreography and improvise for my camera. I was drawn to those high-risk, non- repeatable moments  not plucked from a continuum, that exist only as isolated instants: they are uniquely photographic events. That body of work looks surreal because the viewer tends to conflate the time spent looking at the photo with the duration of the actual photographed event.

This new series, which I began in 2013, is more about the expression and gesture of a solo dancer. I am still “solidifying” the split second, but when I look at the photos from the “One to One” series, I am not looking at an instant that is revealed and preserved. Especially at the 5-foot scale they are meant to be viewed at, I feel that time has not been stopped, but is passing before my eyes.

In these enigmatic scenarios there is no choreography. These are “private” moments, which develop from the dancer’s improvisation with the various elements 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.