I am fascinated with movement. This is probably why I am so drawn to the creation of dances, constantly developing new movement vocabularies and exploring the different types of physicality I can achieve with my body. But movement is fleeting. They occur within the briefest second, and then disappears into the next. One of the questions I continuously find myself asking, is if there is some way to document the history of our movements.

I was initially inspired by the photography of of Tom Carvaglia, who has experiemented with different types of photographic techniques to achieve a trail of movement. Last summer during bootcamp, he inspired me to investigated ways in which I could achieve this effect with a processing sketch. The outcome was extremely unexpected but surprisingly beautiful. Below are several examples of those experiments using my iphone as light in a dark room with my processing sketch.

This time around I wanted to see if I could achieve a more “photo-realistic” effect by using my camera. I tried several different combinations of aperture and shutter speed settings. I found that a slower shutter speed would give me more of a trail with the movement, but I lost some of the crispness of the subject. I decided the best way to figure out what the best setting was, would be to go out and experiment. One of my closest friends Molly and I went out into Williamsburg and shot dance phrases in several different locations. I personally love the industrial grunge aesthetic, and felt it would be an interesting contrast with the blurs of the movement.

After taking about 1,000 photographs, I brought certain sequences into photoshop and overlaid them on one another. Below are my final composites:

Tags: dance, photography, technology, williamsburg
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