NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Charlotte Landreau, Soloist, Martha Graham Dance Company. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
New York City-based photographers Deborah Ory and Ken Browar have spent the past two and a half years creating images of today’s most influential dancers in their home studio. A project that began in a quest to make photographs to decorate their daughter’s bedroom quickly became a long-term endeavor to capture the beauty of movement. This self-funded project, fueled by their passion for photography and dance, resulted in the team’s first book: The Art of Movement—a beautiful, award-winning 300 page compilation featuring photographs of more than 70 dancers from the world’s leading companies including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet, among many others.
Ory, who started dancing when she was 7, began her photography career photographing rehearsals when a dance injury prevented her from performing. She has shot editorial for magazines including Self, Martha Steward Living and Real Simple and served as photo editor for House and Garden and Mirabella.
Fashion and beauty photographer Browar began his career in Paris, with work published in some of the leading fashion magazines in Europe and the U.S. including Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire. Browar’s interest in dance began when he photographed dancers for the Paris Opera Ballet.
Together their NYC Dance Project has been featured in numerous magazines ranging from Harper’s Bazaar to Vogue Italia.
For behind the scenes insight into the project, you can read our Q&A with this talented team. Be sure to scroll through the gallery to see some of the images from the project.
The book can be purchased here. Follow NYC Dance Project on Facebook and Instagram And if you’re in New York City, check out these events celebrating the book:
November 7 - ABT Jr Council Book Launch – A cocktail party and book signing; many of the ABT dancers will be there. More info and tickets
November 10 - Barnes and Noble Book Signing - 7pm - 150 East 86th Street, New York City. A book signing and Q&A. Ory and Bowar will be joined by Martha Graham Principal dancers, Lloyd Knight and Masha Dashkina Maddux (the dancer on the cover). More info here
November 30, 2016 - Martha Graham Dance Company Studio Series - 7pm. Ory and Browar will be having a discussion with Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Members of the Martha Graham Company will be performing and there will be a chance to take photographs of the dancers. Reserve your tickets here
December 8, 2016 - Rizzoli Bookstore - 6-8pm. 1133 Broadway, New York City. There will be drinks and a launch party to celebrate the book as well as a panel discussion with Ory, Browar and the dancers. rizzolibookstore.com
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Xin Ying, Principal, Martha Graham Dance Company. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
How did the NYC Dance Project get started? What was your inspiration?
The inspiration for the project came when our daughter Sarah, an aspiring ballerina, wanted to decorate her room with dance photographs. To our disappointment, we were not able to find images of the current dancers that Sarah admired in any contemporary books or photographs. There were beautiful images of famous dancers from past generations – such as Baryshnikov or Markova, taken more than 40 years ago – but nothing of the current stars.
Ken decided we needed to photograph these dancers ourselves. We were great fans of Daniil Simkin, the American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer, and sent him an email asking him to be our first subject. Daniil loves photography and agreed to be photographed and this was the beginning of NYC Dance Project. Daniil helped us in getting a lot of other dancers involved in the project. It was a time when dancers were starting to use social media to promote themselves and they were interested in having images taken.
We originally thought it was going to be a blog, but after we had 4-5 shoots, we realized this had a longer life than we thought it would.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Gillian Murphy, Principal, American Ballet Theatre. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
You’re very active in social media. How has that benefited you and the project?
Social media is a really important part of our project and we started with it right away. Daniil Simkin was very involved in social media and helped us learn how to promote our project through Facebook and Instagram. Our audience has been really active and it’s been a great way for us to reach even more people. Through social media, we have been able to reach an international market – we have dancers from around the world contacting us and asking about doing shoots with us when they are touring to NYC. It’s been a great way for us to connect worldwide with the dancers.
Having a large social media following was also important to our publisher, as it’s a great way to promote the book.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Michael Jackson Jr, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
Your studio is set up in your living room. How do you manage that arrangement?
Ken and I mostly worked in rental studios or outdoors previous to this and the fact that we work from our home changes the mood for the shoot. There are usually no more than the two of us, the dancer and sometimes a hair and makeup artist. Because it’s a small crew, in our home, it’s a very warm and friendly environment. There is something about the casualness of being in our home that we really love. We also can do a shoot at the last minute. Often we leave our studio set up for a few days and shoot several dancers. We go in spurts where shoot a lot, then we put our home back together and spend a few days editing.
The space we have is very large. We were able to do a shoot with 9 dancers here, although it was very tight. Ideally we would have an even larger studio, but as this is a self-funded project, we never would have been able to do it if we rented a studio.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Michael Jackson Jr, Daniel Harder, Sean Aaron Carmon, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
Tell us about how your studio space is set up, what gear you use and how you work together.
Our home is a loft space with 16 foot high ceilings. Usually our background is about 15 feet high. We work with a Hasselblad on a tripod, using a standard 80mm lens. We now have the H6D. We like working with medium format, because we love the way it looks. Also, we like printing the images very large and the medium format lends itself well to this. We work very slowly, as we are using strobes and never have used a motor drive. When a dancer does a jump, we have to get the timing right, there is no room for mistakes!
We tend to keep our lighting very simple, with just one or two lights – from the top and/or side, depending on where the subject is and how they are moving. We’ve been using Profoto’s D4’s. These are not as fast as other lights that would stop the action 100%, but we are not bothered by not having technically perfect images. It’s the emotion and movement that we are trying to capture.
Our light is just to enhance the movement. We’ll start with the movement and think about how the light can work the best to complement it. Since the dancer is always moving throughout these shoots, we are constantly adjusting the light, bringing reflectors in and out and refining things. It’s all very fluid.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Artem Ovcharenko, Principal, Bolshoi Ballet. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
...(cont.) People write us all the time asking if we can send them a lighting diagram. We can’t do this as we are constantly adjusting the lights. It’s so helpful having two people making the images – one of us is watching the dancer and the other is moving a light or adjusting it.
We use hand painted backgrounds that we’ve had an artist make. She is constantly refining it over and over for us. At one point she told us that she can’t add any more paint to it, it was getting too thick to roll up!
We have wood floors but we put a Marley dance floor, which comes in rolls, on top of the floor and underneath the canvas. That helps dancers from slipping and helps keep the canvas in place as well.
In the beginning we each worked with our own camera and had our own idea of what the image should be. The dancer would have to repeat the movement for each of us and we would compare who captured it better. Now we have become a team and work with one camera.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
James Whiteside, Principal, American Ballet Theatre. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
When a dancer comes into the studio for a shoot, how much do you direct them? Where do you begin?
Most of these dancers are well known dancers that we have seen perform before. If we haven’t seen them live—such as dancers from another country—then we’ll watch videos of them so we kind of know their strengths. Ken and I have an idea about what we would like to capture about each dancer, but once the dancer comes in, it’s a collaboration with them as well. We have them start moving with very little direction from us. We’ll look at a few images together and start to refine them. Usually we pick one or two ideas to work on and fine tune those until we get an image we all feel works well.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Miriam Miller, New York City Ballet. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
Who styles the dancers and where do you get the outfits for the shoots?
I [Ory] do most of the styling for our shoots. Once we worked with a stylist and we felt it was too much about fashion and often the clothes did not move well. The clothing needs to be simple and beautiful, but most importantly, it needs to move well.
Clothing is a really important element for us. We’ve gotten outfits from different designers, including Leanne Marshall, who has been a big contributor for us. Companies like ABT will sometimes give us old costumes. They’re tattered and hand stitched and I love that you can see little rips and tears.
We also sometimes paint their pointe shoes so they match the clothing. In fashion you would never wear the same colored shoes with every outfit, so why would you wear pink pointe shoes with every dress?
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Fana Tesfagiorgis, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
What software do you use and how much post-processing is involved?
On set we shoot tethered with Hasselblad’s Phocus software. The images are brought into Lightroom to edit and the post-processing is done in Photoshop, after we have made our selects. Post-processing is pretty minimal in terms of what we do to the pictures. Most of our time is spent cleaning up spots and dust in the background. There is very little manipulation of the images themselves.
Often we have to remove cats from the photos! Our cats are literally walking through the set and often they are in the photo or there is a tail in the picture. They will go lay down underneath the dancer, no matter what the dancer is doing!
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Misty Copeland, Principal, American Ballet Theatre, from our shoot for Harper's Bazaar, Degas story. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
You were commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar to do an editorial with American Ballet Theatre’s Principal dancer, Misty Copeland in conjunction with the Degas exhibit at MOMA. How did that come about?
Harper’s Bazaar found us on Instagram and also through another principal dancer who recommended us for this job. Glenda Bailey, their Editor-in-Chief, wanted someone who was used to shooting dancers, rather than a fashion photographer. Also, we had worked with Misty before, so they had seen our images of her. While we were very fortunate that they picked us, we were not really looking for commercial assignments at that time. They asked us if we had a porfolio and we just suggested they look through our Instagram feed. It was interesting to us as we knew how difficult it can be to send your portfolio and try to get jobs with magazines like Harper’s Bazaar.
It was a really difficult shoot. Bazaar wanted to make the pictures look exactly like Degas’ painting of dancers. We were stressing about how to make these images keep the perspective and painterly look of the Degas paintings. Degas sometimes just painted things in the background and we could not figure out what these things were. What are those blue streaks? Is he painting a set or was that just for effect? It was really a challenge re-creating these paintings!
There were about 50 people on set, and it was the first time we had worked with a crew that large for a dance shoot. The space we used at Pier 59 photo studios in NYC was really large, but we had to create 5-6 sets and there was only room to put up 2 at a time. Luckily, there were a lot of people to help us create these sets and it all came together beautifully. There was a lot of press surrounding the story, so it really helped us to get better known.
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
© Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
Your first book, The Art of Movement, was released this October. What was it like to publish your first book?
As photographers, both of us had always dreamed of making a book. We certainly did not just create the images for instagram! Meeting with publishers was a bit depressing, however; most said they only do a dance book every ten years or so. It took a lot of persistence, and also a great literary agent, to help us find the right publisher. Although it worked out in the end, we got our contract at the last minute. Our publisher, Black Dog & Leventhal, wanted to get the book out this year, so we had to work incredibly quickly to meet the deadline. We barely slept for a few months. Putting together a 300 page book in such a short amount of time was very ambitious and stressful, but looking back now, it definitley feels worth the struggle!
NYC Dance Project: The Art of Movement
Michael Jackson Jr and Sean Aaron Carmon, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. © Ken Browar and Deborah Ory
What’s next for you?
It’s likely that we will make another book. The next step is also working with galleries. We just started working with the Holden Luntz Gallery in Palm Beach and will be looking for a gallery in NYC as well.