It doesn’t look like the kind of place where magic would be done: a dusty, dark, cavernous space barely furnished, except with oddments–a Ping-Pong table so covered with papers it couldn’t possibly be used, a lone punching bag. Photographer William Frederking used to share this floor of an old manufacturing building on South Michigan with a demolition company he swears was named Smash. Whenever he’d have dancers in for a shoot, he says, the Smash employees would file past his studio, peering at the folks in their underwear.
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Right in the middle of the room is the place where the magic happens, where a backdrop of silvery fabric flows from ceiling to floor like a great sail. “I want to record the moments that don’t exist. I mean, they do. But most of these moments nobody ever sees. My camera sees them.” Looking at proof sheets, he points out a tap dancer who seems to skid along the floor on the tops of his feet, and though Frederking took the shot, he’s as amazed as anyone that dancers can do such things.
His dance photography has evolved dramatically even in the short time he’s been doing it, from rather stiff posed shots to close-ups of dancers screaming, hair whipping around their faces. But he’s had good reflexes from the start. “I love doing the leaps and jumps and the hair flying. I love some of my recent work where the shot is really tight and you don’t see the rest of the dancers’ bodies.” But most recently he’s gotten interested in more subtle images. “There’s a sense of movement in the way the body’s extended and the tension in the body. These are things I’m finally learning–movement issues that translate into visual images.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yael Routtenberg.
