“I’ve spent the last 35 years of my photographic career investigating movement and its expressive potential. My inspiration has always been photography’s ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see. What intrigues me is making images that confound and confuse the viewer, but that the viewer knows, or suspects, really happened.The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer’s movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture. 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.I prefer to work outside the constraints of choreography, collaborating with dancers on improvised, non-repeatable, often high-risk moments. These moments are not plucked from a continuum, but exist only as isolated instants. There is a dynamic tension between dance and photography. I exploit photography’s ability to fragment time and fracture space, translating 360 degrees into a 2 dimensional image, depicting moments beneath the threshold of perception.I am dealing in the poetics of a visual language rather than in its literalness. I want my images to defy rational explanation. There is no “solution” to the questions posed by my photographs- they are meant to frame contradictions, present the impossible, and find coherence within chaos. 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, and the surrealism of the imagery comes from the fact that our brains don’t register split seconds of movement.“
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
