A Greek key runs along the hem of one dancer’s short white skirt, that ancient meander stitched as a border, and it tells you at once what code the picture is speaking: classicism, theatre, the body as ornament. Six male dancers assemble on a rock at the lake’s edge, arms flung into balletic lines against a pale sky. Their costumes quote centuries at once, a ragged faun, a Renaissance doublet, a plain athletic harness of white webbing.
What holds them together is not narrative but gesture, fingers splayed, wrists broken at exact angles, a lunge caught with one palm pressed flat to the chest. Photography records this the way it records everything, indifferently and completely, so that the frayed threads of the torn tunic and the meander’s crisp geometry receive the same silver attention. The medium does not know that one costume is noble and another destitute; it registers only edges, tones, the grain of cloth against skin. This is its democracy and its cruelty.
These are principals of the New York stage, gathered by a photographer who made the athletic male body the signature of American fashion. Out of the theatre and onto an Adirondack shore, they become something between troupe and tribe. The gelatin silver print is itself a kind of stage: an object you can hold, pass hand to hand, hang on a wall, where six leaps are stilled into one arrangement forever. Look how the Greek key, meant to repeat without end, closes the picture as neatly as a signature.
A Greek key runs along the hem of one dancer’s short white skirt, that ancient meander stitched as a border, and it tells you at once what code the picture is speaking: classicism, theatre, the body as ornament. Six male dancers assemble on a rock at the lake’s edge, arms flung into balletic lines against a pale sky. Their costumes quote centuries at once, a ragged faun, a Renaissance doublet, a plain athletic harness of white webbing.
What holds them together is not narrative but gesture, fingers splayed, wrists broken at exact angles, a lunge caught with one palm pressed flat to the chest. Photography records this the way it records everything, indifferently and completely, so that the frayed threads of the torn tunic and the meander’s crisp geometry receive the same silver attention. The medium does not know that one costume is noble and another destitute; it registers only edges, tones, the grain of cloth against skin. This is its democracy and its cruelty.
These are principals of the New York stage, gathered by a photographer who made the athletic male body the signature of American fashion. Out of the theatre and onto an Adirondack shore, they become something between troupe and tribe. The gelatin silver print is itself a kind of stage: an object you can hold, pass hand to hand, hang on a wall, where six leaps are stilled into one arrangement forever. Look how the Greek key, meant to repeat without end, closes the picture as neatly as a signature.