Find Your Muse-Inspiration

My Muse
I tend to find that much of my work gravitates towards the art of dance.  It’s been a part of my life since I was 3 and it keeps becoming more and more important to me as I’ve gotten older.  It’s a means of keeping me mentally sound, physically healthy, and blissfully happy.

Lois Greenfield

Lois Greenfield is a world renowned dance photographer who is known for her weightless looking, impossible movements of her dancers.  She began as a documentary photographer for newspapers and magazines until one day she had to cover a dance performance.  When photographing performances, the one must anticipate the movement of the dancer and the lighting upon the model while everything is in continuous motion. Greenfield says “I’ve spent the last 25 years of my photographic career investigating movement and its expressive potential…My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.”  She strives to confound the viewer with how she captures the dancers’ movements.  They often wonder how the dancers got into the positions they were in.  She achieves a weightlessness by using white or black backgrounds and often encourages the dancers to improvise so that she can capture unplanned, imaginative movement. Greenfield also uses extra props in her work such as extravagant fabrics, mirrors, flour, etc. that enhance the dancers movements within the photograph.  

“Dancers Among Us”

Jordan Matter embarked on a series involving dancers in everyday situations being completely alive and in the moment, which often seemed out of place in these settings.  They often were jumping, contorting their body, or doing some type of dancing pose that showed an energy that we often see in children, but as we grow older we seem to lose over time.  Matter says “Dancers are storytellers. They’re trained to personify passionate moments, their bodies imbued with a stunning combination of artistry and athleticism. They create a fantasy world, offering us a deeper look into familiar settings. They bring to life what we feel but are unable to express physically.”  

My Series

Upon researching and viewing the work of these photographers, it has inspired me to create my own series about my life and how dance relates to it.  My idea is to take dancers that I know and to use them in everyday situations that correlate to me in regards to my life in my hometown and now my life in Charlotte.  I’m going to place these dancers in these settings that are personally mine, and really immerse them into the situation.  I also have been thinking of wrapping/engaging my models in different materials (like fabric) that deal with each situation.  I want my settings to be extremely kinetic and energetic so that it has that feeling of motion being frozen in time.  This is where Photoshop will come into play.  I can manipulate these objects and materials in my pieces, to warp them, repeat them, and interact them more within the image to give it that “in motion” quality that I’m striving for.
Overall, I really want these to be an expression of me and how I feel dance plays a part in my daily life and even in my past when I was back in my hometown.