Minimalist Body Studies
Dr. Matthias Harder, Director Helmut Newton Foundation
Dance is challenging to describe, document, and transform through other artistic mediums — and few succeed as brilliantly as Alwin Maigler. The first impression that comes to mind upon viewing Maigler’s images of dance is a unique fusion of movement and power, of physicality and sensuality. Maigler’s photography takes an unconventional approach to portraying over a dozen dancers from the Stuttgart Ballet.
To translate their movements and postures into photographic images, he does not capture their work on stage or during rehearsals, but in his own studio. This process recalls early dance photography from the 1920s, when Expressionist dancers would reenact stage scenes in front of huge spotlights at a photo studio, some of which were notably published in Vogue.
Alwin Maigler’s choice to shoot in a photography studio, however, is conceptually driven. He offers little direction to the subject. Instead, he intuitively anticipates the dancers’ movements, following them spontaneously through the space. By doing so, he deconstructs the dance, presenting it with care and concentration in its most pure and aesthetic form.
The idea for this series began during the Corona pandemic, when theaters were closed and public life in Germany had come to a halt. The extensive and magnificent series Nuances is the result of that time. The title describes and understands these rich gradations within a spatial and temporal continuum. The images mainly feature individuals, occasionally in pairs or groups, using natural light and only two focal lengths: a wide-angle and a short telephoto lens. Sometimes the camera is in immediate proximity to the subject. At other moments, the pho tographer maintains a slight distance. Ultimately, Maigler’s intuitive approach to his subjects captures the pure and spontaneous spirit of dance.
With Nuances, Maigler’s studio photographs are being published for the first time. The images were exhibited only once before, in Stuttgart’s Leica Gallery, in the largest presentation of unique carbon prints to date. The technically elaborate, historical printing technique allows only one original per motif. Thus, all images in this book are reproductions of the respective master prints. By forgoing a limited edition per image motif, Maigler consciously challenges traditional technical reproduction capabilities of the photographic medium in the context of art.
Alwin Maigler begins the sequence of images in this publication with an unusual view of a dancer’s back, leaning forward, followed by a shot of another dancer putting on her ballet shoes — so begins the immediate and intense interplay between dance and photography. Other dancers join, each exuding deep concentration. Some images seem almost hypnotic, whereas others are pure body studies.
Many figures are depersonalized as the photographer often fixes his lens on the torso, hands, or legs—we only learn their names, their identities, in the book’s index. The theatricality and architecture of the space play no role here. Occasionally, the materiality of a lit corner or dark fabric flashes in the background. But above all, focus remains on the fascinating, expressive bodies and their photographic transformation.
The delicate, almost poetic movements of these young men and women find their counterpart in Maigler’s atmospheric studies, which merge action, dynamics, and drama of the improvised movement from one image to another.
This occurs on consecutive pages of this publication, for example, when a dancer’s extended leg on one page seems to reach toward the cut-off upper body of a dancer on the next page. To this end, the presentation of the book itself continues to reimagine the choreography long after the dancers have finished their movements.
The photographer captures poses, gestures, motions, and the extreme bodily tensions of dance as an inherently fleeting art form, visually suspended within the photograph. The human body, in effect, becomes sculptural. When Maigler exposes a scene slightly longer than the classic 1⁄125 th of a second, the outer contours of the bodies and their clothing begin to dissolve, creating a successive fluidity, like a trace or a mark in time. This in turn intensifies the dance— with the attempt to conserve it.
We experience fewer details than in the sculptural transformation of live performance. Rather, the intoxicating power of motion within the still medium of photography unfolds, nuanced, before us, perhaps even igniting our own memories of a grand ballet evening.
Alwin Maigler serves as both photographer and choreographer behind his camera, giving the performative and momentary gesture of dance a certain permanence.
