[Image:3657,right]Dance photographer Joe Lambie got his first camera age 9, and wanted to be a painter as a teen. He says he got distracted (by girls, football) but kept taking photos. Working his way through college, as a stage-hand in the dance departments, Lambie fell in love with dance. Why?
Lambie realised that dancers, in performance, go to a place that other performers never get to. That their discipline, training and the pain they go through, allow them to achieve physical ecstasy in performance. This was articulated by Jacques d'Amboise in 1965, in a Q & A session after a New York City Ballet performance that Lambie stage-managed, who said: “dance is ecstatic abandon.” Lambie has tried, ever since, to capture some hint/sense of that in his photos.
Lambie says he goes into a shoot with as few expectations as possible, claiming he doesn’t know enough to stage anything. “The dancers are the artists – the art is what the people in front of the camera do – I let them live in my eye.”
For Lambie, the most important element of a good dance photo is a sense of motion, of going somewhere, doing something. “An awful lot of classic dance photos could be posed. I don't mind if technique is a little off, I don't mind a sense of becoming: a feeling that takes you towards that ecstatic quality. Everything else is subjective.”
“Dance photography is anticipatory by nature. If you wait for the exciting moment, it’s too late, and you miss the moment. But if you’re lucky enough to get to practice, you get good.”