Dance photography was born in the search to chronicle the dancer’s ephemeral art. It has grown up to offer a different, wholly independent, form of permanent performance.

By Debra Cash

These days, dance photography is commonplace. Some images continue in traditional editorial formats, including entire bodies, often focusing on faces to chronicle “where the action is.” Others partake of miscellaneous trendy photographic styles. I dare anyone to guess that Martin Schoeller’s picture of Mark Morris in a gingham suit biting a daisy between his teeth like a sodden cigarette wasn’t taken by Annie Leibowitz.

Mention “Martha Graham” and the image that comes instantly to mind is that of a grieving woman laid horizontal in space, wrist flexed sharply against her forehead, her skirt kicked behind her into a rippling, molten semicircle. This image, from Graham’s 1940 “Letter to the World,” was selected for a 2004 commemorative U.S. postage stamp. It is also the archetypal shot for which photographer Barbara Morgan will always be remembered.

A gorgeous silver gelatin print of this image is on display at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center. Curator Clare Rogan, arriving at her new job last winter, discovered that among Wesleyan’s permanent collection of 6,000 photographs was a wealth of Morgan prints that had been donated to the university when her granddaughter, Caitlin, was an undergraduate there in the late 1980s. It’s a well-thought through one-room show that focuses on Morgan’s images of dancers from the 1930s and ’40s. There’s Graham, of course, with whom Morgan collaborated intensively over a six year period, but also Jose Limon, Doris Humphrey and Erik Hawkins.

The images are as percussive and uncluttered as the choreography they document. They reveal the way Morgan used both the new technology of her Leica and Speed Graphic cameras and the shading effects which she had learned lighting African sculpture at the Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia. “If you light a seven-foot tall black wood statue from above, it becomes a god,” Morgan told Jennifer Dunning in a 1980 New York Times interview. “Lit from below, it is a demon.” Morgan also gained extraordinary insight into way human movement would read at different shutter speeds. “In a centrifugal whirl, the body center is moving more slowly than the finger-tips and the costume at the periphery.”

Most dance photography is simple documentation, destined for editorial reproduction or coffee table tomes. It generally falls into a couple of categories. The first two are primarily historical souvenirs: portraiture and images of celebrity dancers (Pavlova, Nijinsky, Nureyev, Baryshnikov) and images of a company and its repertory (such as New York City Ballet or Pilobolus). As a kid I was enthralled with these types of pictures. I could recognize, by sight, dancers I had seen in Jack Mitchell or Martha Swope’s pictures for Life and Dance Magazine without ever seeing them perform. They also gave me visual overviews of repertory I didn’t see performed until I was much older.

Such photographs have the same effect as the audio recordings of great musicians: they imply and reinforce an elevated standard of technical excellence. Once Gelsey Kirkland was shown, in a famous Mimi Cotter picture, nearly kicking the back of her head as she leapt in “Don Quixote,” everyone else dancing the role had to be able to do that feat too. Such images make anything less than “peak” achievements look like mistakes.

Morgan had a great eye — she had been a painter long before her husband Willard talked her into taking pictures — but in retrospect the power of her images lies in the fact that she and Graham shared a creative sensibility. In the famous essay accompanying the images in her 1941 book “Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs,” Morgan wrote, “Every dance has peaks of emotional intensity; moments when the dance “speaks” to the audience. These are the moments when the form of the dance is in closest unison with the original compulsion which gave it birth. Dance is experienced continuously in time and space, but is remembered by these instants of combustion.”

Graham, acutely aware of dance as an ephemeral art form, responded to Morgan’s ability to pinpoint intense affect. The two women, who often began a shooting session by meditating together, even created a dance expressly for Morgan’s camera. The print of “War Themes” from 1941 is splendid. The entire image condenses on the whiteness of Graham’s throat, exposed as if open to a knife, while her dark skirt and a heavy shadow weight the frame like cannonballs. This is a very different sensibility than that of Arnold Newman’s great 1961 black and white portrait: here the elderly Graham is swathed in a black caftan before the graphic, horizontal lines of a ballet barre, resembling a mountain defining the space around her.

Morgan’s dedicated focus on peak movements has been a hard criterion to challenge. Lois Greenfield, the most influential dance photographer of the 1980s and ’90s, has had to make explicit that she was after something quite different. You’ve seen her images: muscular men and women, sometimes naked, bursting out of the picture frame. (Her commercial work includes dance-themed calendars and ad campaigns for Raymond Weil Watches.) Working with the square (rather than rectangular) format of a Hasselblad camera and a telephoto lens that cropped the dancers’ bodies radically, Greenfield’s big insight was that exploding dance beyond the frame would convey that the motion was extending beyond direct perception. Shooting at 1/500th of a second, she was determined to show not what might occur on stage but juxtapositions the eye could never register.

Greenfield replaced Morgan’s graphic gravity with a sense of weightless tumbling. Her work has influenced a dance zeitgeist where the more high-risk and free the motion is, the better. And like Morgan, Greenfield considers dancers collaborators. Her favorite model, David Parsons, even choreographed a dance about their shared efforts: his strobe-lit 1982 solo, “Caught,” has become his company’s signature.

At a time digital software programs make just about any image technically feasible, it becomes more important than ever that photographers and choreographers find communion. Chris Nash, perhaps the most well-known dance photographer in the UK, seems to have that gift. In books like “StopMotion,” his images — many of them made during rehearsals, before a dance is complete — share the ironic, take-no-prisoners punk sensibility of the contemporary dance companies he photographs. Nash, like Greenfield on occasion, works with trampolines and crash mats, but he digitally elongates body parts, colorizes the prints and quotes visual artists such as Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Nash’s dance photographs have also migrated into environmental installations, reconceptualizing the church paintings of heavenly hosts by way of digital manipulation and Rene Magritte.

Dance photography was born in the search to chronicle the dancer’s ephemeral art. It has grown up to offer a different, wholly independent, form of permanent performance.

“American Document: Barbara Morgan Dance Photographs” runs through October 14, 2005 at the Davidson Arts Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT.