It’s funny that Han used the word “creepy.” When I shared with a writing class that my dad used to take photos of sunbathers on the beach in Seaside Heights, NJ, someone in the class said, “Creepy.” I’d never thought of it as creepy because the photographs always reflected something of compositional inter- est rather than a lascivious glance toward a woman in a bikini: “I didn’t really think about that either until last year when some of my photos were featured on the website Bored Panda. People started making com- ments. Some wonderful comments and few, ‘Oh, that’s creepy!’ That’s when I started going, Oh my God, there are people who are going to think that way. It affected the way I shoot now. Before I wasn’t thinking about the woman looking beautiful or sexy when I was taking the photo. I was thinking about composition, lighting, the expression on her face. But after the Bored Panda experience, I went back to Japan and noticed that when I was taking photos I was very aware of that. It kind of put a leash on me a little bit. I don’t know if it’s good or not.” We are in a moment where we’re being forced to become aware of these things and that’s a net good for our society. As to whether this awareness makes art better or worse, who’s to say? I think those are sepa- rate issues. I can’t watch a Woody Allen movie anymore because of who I now under- stand him to be. His art is ruined for me because I have a new lens on it. I’m pretty sure I’d laugh as hard now at Love and Death as I did before the revelations about his conduct. That’s partly why I won’t watch it again. I feel like my laughter would make me complicit. Some artists are interested in this challenge, others feel like it’s an affront to their creative liberty. Han sees it as a period of figuring things out. Han’s dance photographs are interest- ing art objects in and of themselves. They respond to the dance and in so doing become part of the dance: “I am looking for something that has a story of its own in each shot. Rather than seeing a photo and recognizing the image as a dance, I want the viewer to really dwell on the image.” And that’s what both dance writing and dance photography have to offer—an opportunity to dwell on an image, to inhabit the image as a divining rod that locates and reactivates the dance: “One of my objectives is to get people curious about the performance with just one or handful of photos. I want to cre- ate a visceral, metaphorical, sublime image that people can look at, wonder what it’s about, and want to know more about the artist and the work.” Han and I agree that photography is not an art form of capture but rather of creation. Like a piece of dance writing, a dance pho- tograph is not a corollary to the dance but rather an actuality that exists in conversation with the dance, enriching the conversation around it. The dance photograph helps tell the story of the dance. It’s part of the dance’s archive not unlike the bodies that hold the memory of movement in their tissue. Pak Han and his camera join the bodies in mo- tion and in stillness, in the street and in the theater, in the dance. SIMA BELMAR, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Depart- ment of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ODC Writer in Residence. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar. And that’s what both dance writing and dance photography have to offer—an opportunity to dwell on an image, to inhabit the image as a divining rod that locates and reactivates the dance.
Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes / photo by Pak Han
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in dance MAR 2020
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