II

Photographing dance made me utterly aware how important it was to avoid taking a misleading photograph. What you were recording had to reflect the specificity of the choreographer you were documenting. It was crucial not to make the choreography of Trisha Brown look like ballet or even like the choreography of one of her close friends and fellow choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Consider the pedestrian movement used by Yvonne Rainer in Walk, She Said or the incremental examination of the organic gesture tailored on ones' body in Trisha Brown’s Accumulation (both from 1972). What you saw were two completely different movements, although they were both linked by their ordinariness. They had very different motivations: Walk, She Said was narrative and Accumulation was structuralist.[8] Both choreographies called for photographs that showed some of the commonality of the movement but also the variance in the organizational concept. I didn’t want my photographs to reduce the performance to a cliché or unduly simplify the work.