Gerald Arpino & the Joffrey Ballet

Gerald Arpino, Atlanta, 1994

THESE PHOTOS ARE ARTIFACTS. First of all, they're glimpses of a time when dance - modern dance and ballet and everything in between - was still part of mainstream culture. Dance companies could tour with shows that were real events, the sort of things that a free weekly would fly a writer and photographer to cover. I didn't know it at the time, but this assignment was one of the last healthy signs of journalism, thriving right down to the local level.

I was sent to Atlanta, Georgia with Daryl Jung, NOW's dance columnist - yes, there was once such a job - to see the Joffrey Ballet and interview Gerald Arpino, co-founder and artistic director of the company. They were touring with Billboards, a show set to the music of Prince, and were booked into the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, a beautiful old movie palace on Peachtree Street, at the edge of what was still a dodgy area full of vacant lots.

Joffrey Ballet rehearsal, Fox Theatre, Atlanta, 1994

We arrived in time to attend a rehearsal, which I shot with a long lens from my seat. I am not a dance photographer, so these are really just snapshots of the work that goes on before a dance performance, with stagehands setting up while dancers run through steps, tamping down the wiring in their muscle memory. I'd recommend anyone who enjoys dance to watch a rehearsal, just to get a sense of how much hard work - much of it slowly, inevitably damaging to the body - goes into an effortless performance.

I don't think that there are too many performing arts that can move me quite the way a good dance can, and I'll admit being moved to tears watching the performance that night in Atlanta, and again later in Toronto. I have no idea how dancers achieve what they can, or any ability to comprehend the language that creates choreography, so dancing always seems like a miracle to me,

If I knew more I might have become a dance aficionado - a balletomane, even - but my enthusiasm is purely that of an interested amateur. There was one particularly statuesque principal dancer that Daryl and I both appreciated, and I'm afraid we might have acted like stage door Johnnies when we met her at a reception after the show.

Gerald Arpino, Atlanta, 1994

Billboards wasn't well received by dance critics, but it was a commercial success for the company at a difficult time in their history. It was the sort of thing that used to get called "middlebrow," back when that was both a pejorative and a term that people understood. The decline of middlebrow culture has been disastrous, both as a bridge between low and high culture, and as a space where something like the Joffrey could expand its audience and fill its coffers. Its almost total absence today has made high culture unappealing and mass culture dreary.

I photographed Arpino just up Peachtree from the Fox Theatre, in one of the many vacant lots that once dotted the street. I shot rolls of colour slide for the cover by a set of marble gates that didn't lead to anything in particular, and had him pose for the inside shot in a patch overgrown with kudzu and other weeds that seemed to be taking over the place. A glimpse at Google Street View shows that it's all gone now, disappeared under redevelopment.

Gerald Arpino died of prostate cancer in Chicago on Oct. 29, 2008.

Mark Morris

Mark Morris, Toronto, March 1992

BACK AT THE END OF THE EIGHTIES AND THE EARLY NINETIES, when I was in New York City a lot visiting a girlfriend, I'd try to meet with photographers whose work I admired. While the closest I ever got to Irving Penn was prostrating myself in front of his door, I did meet with Michael Lavine, whose proto-grunge album cover work I admired, and with Lois Greenfield, the dance photographer for the Village Voice.

I recall Greenfield being very wary of me when I showed up at her studio, which I remember being somewhere around Canal Street. She relaxed a bit when I showed her my portfolio and realized that I wasn't doing anything like her stunning, improbable pictures of dancers frozen in mid-air. I wanted to meet her because I loved her work, which has actually gotten better over the years since her time at the Voice.

Mark Morris, Toronto, March 1992

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have always loved watching dance - ballet, tap, modern, whatever. As an essentially static, graceless person, I find it thrilling to watch someone with that rare gift perform. I'm old enough to remember when dancers were celebrities and dance companies were talked about with the same passion and connoisseurship as writers or foreign movies.

Mark Morris was probably one of the last star dancers, someone whose work was talked about in weekend arts sections and profiled in magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Like Twyla Tharp before him, he took ballet's formal language and modernized it. That much I knew; what I didn't know when I was assigned to shoot him for a NOW cover was how I would capture that on film.

Mark Morris, Toronto, March 1992

Photographing him the same year in New York, my friend Chris would somehow talk Morris out of his clothes and capture him in a pose that featured both his compact but muscular build and his testicles. I have always been timid about trying to capture movement - I am a still and graceless person, as I said - so I grounded Morris firmly in a chair in the middle of the empty rehearsal space.

The shots I took on two rolls of black and white 35mm film are about dancers doing what they do quite a lot - sitting around waiting to move. The shot at the top, taken with my Rollei, is a bit more successful, pressing Morris down into the chair in a pool of light provided by my off-camera flash. His slightly defiant expression also helps. It's also imperative to note that the whole thing might have been more forgettable if he weren't wearing those striped socks.