Frozen in Time

Photographs of Dance
Apr 8, 2006 – May 7, 2006
© Marc Volk
© Marc Volk
© Marc Volk
© Marc Volk
© Marc Volk

Motion and photography are total opposites, not just in art. Motion, the motor of any change, is the embodiment of the living and the present. It’s highest aesthetic expression is artistic dance, motion guided by music, melody and rhythm. Dance symbolizes dynamism and constant change. A photograph of a motion is a loss but also a gain. A loss because it cannot reproduce the duration of a specific physical movement: Photography fragments space and breaks time into pieces. What remains is the trace of reflected light on a two-dimensional plane, a fragment that has been preserved. Dance photography creates a “frozen” moment; for that reason, it is more “artificial” than performing art. It “depicts” performing art but can only preserve a fragment of it. Dance photography shows a human body as a mixture of time and light, as a barely-tangible movement, and as such, it is confronted with the ambivalent contrast between dynamism and a snapshot of a single moment.

The exhibition “Frozen in Time: Photographs of Dance” is made up of a video installation and fifty photographs—some colour, some black-and-white—by selected German dance photographers and artists. World-famous choreographers such as William Forsythe and Sasha Waltz and companies such as the Staatsballett Berlin have inspired photographers to these unusual artistic explorations of dance and movement. The show provides a representative introduction to an art form located at the interface between documentation and artistic autonomy. This exhibition has been designed as a travelling exhibition and will have its only German showing at C/O Berlin. The works will then tour the world with the support of the Goethe-Institut.