BOOK “A DANCE” by Alexander Barabanov
REVIEW by James Brewer
The acclaimed photo expert, Mark Holborn, who edits A Dance, sees the book as following in the footsteps of Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet, one of the three defining photographic books of the mid-20th century together with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and Robert Frank’s The Americans.
Angela Taylor : Julia Machalina Dying Swan with MW cello. Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Charity Gala. London 2001.
Jean-Clode Gallota : Non Dance
SHan Wei New Yor Shan Wei
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780224085113 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0224085115 |
| Author: | Alexander Barabanov |
| Imprint: | Jonathan Cape Ltd |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 304 |
| Release Date: | 17 March 2011 |
| Weight: | 2.34kg |
| Dimensions: | 301mm x 295mm x 54mm |
| Series: | Jonathan Cape / Penguin Random / London |
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Capturing motion and energy, ideals and art forms, this book is a showpiece of moments in dance, embodied here at the highest level by the art of photography.
A Dance presents the evolution of dance and photography in the last 150 years, in a sequence of what it calls 10 movements. The earliest image, dated 1860, of a French dancer with tarot cards, sets the timeless tone in seeming to be an echo of contemporary dance installations, while the most recent, of Luc Petton dancing with birds in La confidence des oiseaux (2008), could have been captured at any moment in the last few decades. Conscious that dance in its classical embodiment and contemporary creations have long co-existed, the author and photography collector, Alexander Barabanov, has constructed a montage of arresting performance stills and symbols of powerful, historic, contemporary, beautiful, erotic and exotic passages in dance.
The selections, some blown up from tiny prints in brittle contact sheets, are overwhelmingly in monochrome, and this works just right. Transposed to borderless full pages, they are lent further impact by the splashes of colour which intersperse them. Millions of images were trawled through to produce this outcome.
Throughout this 304 page work, subject and essence dominate the structure, eschewing the banality of chronology. Some of the top dance photographers of the world are here. On the jacket of this titan book, Mikhail Baryshnikov soars in birdlike flight, “hangs in the air,” as the male lead in Dafnis and Chloe, as though posing expressly for the photographer Nina Alovert. Such capture of movement is what all dance photographers strive for, immortalising the energy of a moment. The majority of the images are of live performance, revealing not only the talent of the photographer but also the marvellous skills of the dancers. Swans and tutus are given their due, but classical ballet’s broader canvas lures much of the stunningcamerawork.
In our view, the disarming keynote for the book is a photo of the legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova, in the St Petersburg studio of sculptor Boris Frodman-Cluzel. This print, made a century ago, is published for the first time. The dancer poses abstractedly, at her side a basket of lilies of the valley perfuming the room. As with many other images here, this belongs to a private collection.
From an unknown photographer of a later era, we see the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, in rehearsal class on the deck of a ship bound for New York in 1936. Man Ray, whose wife Juliet Browne was a professional dancer, followed the Ballets Russes enthusiastically, and in Paris in 1925 he immortalises a scene from Jack in the Box, a ballet based on libretto by Jean Cocteau.
There is an emotional and mesmerising picture of Mary Wigman’s Schatten (The Shadows) dated 1932 and a series of beautiful, natural images of the avant-garde Laban dance movement from the 1920s.
