Lights, Camera, Action!

Lois greenfield’s simple lighting captures the complex movements of dancers.

- Jack Neubart

SUCCESSFULLY CAPTURING DANCERS WITH GRACE, style, and a certain sensibility for how they move takes a discerning and artistic eye. Equally, it takes an appreciation and understanding of how dancers do what they do to be able to capture just the right moment. And all that defines the photography of Lois Greenfield.

Greenfield didn’t start out as a dance photographer or even a dancer. She had studied anthropology and was fully expecting to become an ethnographic filmmaker. But fate took an odd twist. She found herself working for a newspaper during college and was assigned to shoot dance concerts. And she realized she liked it. That eventually led to a full blown career shooting dance movement—all founded on split-second timing, short flash durations, and keeping the lighting simple so that it doesn’t get in the way of the moment.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE DANCE 

In her latest book, Lois Greenfield: Moving Still (Chronicle Books), William Ewing wrote: “Her real interest is not the dance, but the expressive potential of the human body in motion.” I asked Greenfield to expand on that comment.

“I’m not interested in choreography, which is a codified vocabulary of movement,” Greenfield explained.

“I’m interested more in improvisation, spontaneous moments created uniquely for the camera. I like to utilize the camera’s ability to fragment time and capture a two-thousandth of a second that the human eye can’t see.”

That 1/2000th of a second is essentially a function of the Broncolor lighting gear Greenfield uses. More to the point, to deliver the needed light, she employsbi-tube heads. These heads deliver twice the output of a conventional single-tube flash head, and that means she can shoot at such short flash durations without sacrificing her exposures.

KEEPING THE LIGHTING SIMPLE