Last Updated on 03/18/2024 by Chris Gampat
Every time I speak with Lois Greenfield, she tells me about how she makes incredible photographs of dancers. She doesn’t shoot a ton of frames a second — instead, she simply understands the moment. At times, I swear she called it luck. “No matter how responsive the shutter on your camera is, you still have to take the picture a split second before the peak of the action,” she told us in a 2016 interview. “So it’s best to put your camera on a tripod, and concentrate on what the dancers are doing.” But that’s just the technical part: what Lois makes is art beyond belief. In her latest series called Forces of Nature, she’s returning to directing dancers in studio.
All images by Lois Greenfield. Used with permission. For more, check out her website.
In case you’re not aware of who Lois Greenfield is, she’s been shooting for several decades. Her book, Moving Still, is in my library, and I look at it occasionally. Lois used to shoot dancers with a medium-format Hasselblad camera until she went digital. And her work is a masterclass is being able to zone in and understand the moment before it’s about to happen. It’s a sense of presence that street photographers and many others could only dream of. But more importantly, Lois sees — she doesn’t look. That’s to say that she creates instead of captures.
Lots of Lois’s work that we’ve seen more recently has been done in color. But these are made in black and white — which is where Lois started. It removes so many visual distractions from us and focuses simply on contrast in the scene and specific lighting. There’s an interplay between powder, silks, etc. In the images, we see the dancers who seem like they’re appearing to us as if we’re in a dream-like state. Truly, stances like this don’t almost seem possible — nor does the incredible sense of symmetry.
“Forces of Nature explores the interplay between the human form outside the confines of choreography and forces of nature that shape the world,” she tells the Phoblographer. “Having photographed for the Village Voice in my studio for many years, I had the advantage of photographing the dancers outside the confines of performances. Two of the dancers pictured were directed by me because they were hired to do commercial work.” They all took on their own personas accordingly.
Lois steps into studios and works with dancers. But unlike photographers today, she shoots one frame a second and works to direct them and coordinate the moment the shutter makes the photograph. It yields fewer images and, therefore, peace of mind when editing. Often, she says that she’s inspired by the dancers she photographs. These folks are the heroes of her stories and work with Lois on creative collaborations to make beautiful moments that require insane skill.
It’s crazy to think that work like this could be made by an AI algorithm, right? Lois thinks it’s dangerous and believes that copyright is something photographers need to take much more seriously. “Every photograph I have taken over my many years in photography has been registered by the Library of Congress, which I hope would protect me,” she says. “On the other hand, what if a small piece of one of my photos gets stolen?”