Interview: Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach, Ocean Ballet #1 (Reverse), 2022. © Richard Misrach.
Collaboration between Choreographer Alonzo King, Photographer Richard Misrach and Grammy Award-winning Artist Lisa Fischer.
Richard Misrach, Ilaria as the Lintel of Pi, Cosmic Sea (Reverse), 2022. © Richard Misrach.
Sophie Mulgrew: Why ballet dancers? What is your history with the art form? How does it interact with photography? You chose specifically to have them improvise and “let loose” during shooting – why? The movement wasn’t choreographed but how much of the shooting was? Did you have a particular vision or did you improvise as you went along?
Richard Misrach: I really don’t have any history with ballet although I recently found a letter from the choreographer Molissa Fenley from the 80s, asking me to use my early night Hawaii work for her set design. Even back then, I declined, since I really had no experience .
But then, last year, a friend took me to an Alonzo King LINES Ballet performance and asked me if I’d be interested in doing the sets. Once again, I declined. But then, that very night I had a dream where I saw myself in the desert, photographing the dancers. In the dream, a filmmaker was documenting it, and I was part of the dance. I shared the dream with my friend, who passed it onto Alonzo King, and he went “let’s do it.” So it’s clearly not something I thought about, but when this unusual opportunity to do something so challenging and different came out of nowhere, I went for it.
With the dancers on the cliffs, or in the ocean, they were removed from the controlled choreography of the stage. Now they were moving with all their years of training pit against the forces of nature. I didn’t tell them what to do. I just let them loose and began capturing their fluid, extraordinary movements. In a surprising way, I felt like a “street photographer” in New York capturing the dance of life on the fly.
The one exception would be the shadow ballet images, which was an idea that came to me while in Hawaii watching them, and thinking about an earlier image I had made. In 2008, I photographed a man and his shadow from above on this exact same beach, but what interested me was seeing them actually dance together as elongated, other-worldly shadows. So, in that case I explained my idea to the dancers and Robert Rosenwasser, the art director, and Shadow Ballet was born.
Richard Misrach, Adji on a Raft, Cosmic Sea (Reverse), 2022. © Richard Misrach.
SM: Talk about shadows. How do they function in this work? What interests you about them?
RM: By focusing on the shadows of the dancers, instead of their facial expressions, clothing, individuality etc. the shadows emerge as pure form. And the whole process evoked all kinds of associations, from making shadow puppets as a child to big questions about reality and form as in the allegory of representation versus ideas in Plato’s Cave.
SM: Tell us a bit about the larger live performance project — how are these images incorporated? Was that something you knew about while shooting?
RM: I had no idea how my images would be incorporated into the ballet. In fact, everything is still coming together at the 11th hour (we premiere in two days !!) and we are at the theater until late at night, every night. In the end, basically my still images, along with the filmmaker’s (who shadowed me and used my techniques) will be projected on a giant screen behind the dancers.
Richard Misrach, Shadow Ballet #6 (Reverse), 2022. © Richard Misrach.
SM: Walk us through the technical process for creating an image like Shadow Ballet. Where did this technique come from?
RM: Essentially, I turn a positive image into a negative. This is the whole premise of my new book, Notations (Radius, 2022). Historically, photographers have captured an image as a negative and turned it into a positive. But with the coming of the digital age, this is now basically obsolete. My whole experiment with displaying the negative as the final form, is an experimental homage to the end of an era. The images of the dancers’ shadows, turned into a negative, and then flipped upside down, beautifully exemplifies a kind of rich photographic language yet to be explored.
SM: What Is the relationship between performance and photography? How do you see that functioning here?
RM: Great photographers have documented the performances of great dancers, dressed in their glorious costumes, perfectly lit, at the perfect moments. RJ Muna, for example, has made truly gorgeous pictures of the dancers on stage. I wanted to do something really different, have these beautifully disciplined creatures thrown into an uncontrolled environment, and let them move freely. My performance, as it were, was to release them into the wild, and document their dance with nature. It was stunning.
“The choreographer Alonzo King has collaborated with photographer Richard Misrach. For this work, Misrach photographed the Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers at a remote location in Hawaii that will be integrated into the Spring Season 2023 performances. This collaboration offers a rare opportunity for viewers to experience visionaries of these disparate mediums bridged in their decades-long explorations of the natural world.”
