Picture Story
November 28, 2007
Recently met again with Karin Baker, former dancer and one subject of my in-progress feature piece. Unlike many of the dancers I’ve been in touch with over the course of the semester, Karin has a vast and beautiful collection of photos to document her dance career, thanks to her fastidious and attentive mother. Which is lucky, because her career was pretty amazing. There are pictures of Karin in her teenage years, giving ballet lessons to students her own age in the basement of her childhood home in Cinncinnati (Karin turned the basement into a dance studio when she was 10). There are pictures of Karin on stage performing in a USO tour, her hands and legs blurred by movement and her face over-the-top animate. There are even pictures of her performing on The Carol Burnett show; her mom snapped close-shots of the TV screen to get those. (The quality isn’t so bad, considering.) And above is a picture of Karin in a Capezio ad which ran, she says, for nearly a year. She doesn’t remember how, or when exactly, she landed that job. It’s a cool addition to her albums nonetheless.
I’m interested in the idea of portraying dance through still image. If a photo slideshow were well-done it could call attention to intricacy of movement, to the lines of the body, those things more difficult to notice when a dancer is in motion. I worry a bit about minimalizing the true extent of story, though; in Karin’s case, for example, it would be easy to show Cute Dancing-Karin Age 10 next to Beautiful Dancing-Karin Age 25 next to Wise Teaching-Karin Age 40. But that doesn’t really reveal anything significant about Karin’s career or self. In arranging photos I’m working with transcripts from my original interviews with Karin as the accompanying audio, but I wonder whether it might be better to follow up with a photo-based interview– if that doesn’t push any ethical lines– and ask Karin to talk specifically about each image’s context, her mindset within that context. On its own the images are pretty and interesting and generally nice to look at, but I’d very much like if I could compose the slideshow so that it says and means something more.
November 30, 2007 at 4:23 am
I love your idea about still images of dancers that show the lines of the body and the intricacy of postures. It’s beautiful to think of dance as the art of the body. I have come late to an appreciation of dance, but was really floored by a ballet that I saw about a year ago and have meant to see more. Until seeing this show a year ago, which was a Tchaikovsky piece by a Russian ballet group, I thought that I was bored by dance. But the sheer emotive capacity of the art form executed with such breathtaking grace really turned my head. I look forward to seeing your final product.