NYC Dance Project: a photographic tribute to Graham’s creative legacy 

The third book from renowned photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, the team behind NYC Dance Project, is dedicated to Martha Graham, in the year of the centenary celebrations marking the birth of her New York company (the oldest in the United States). Set to be published on 7 October, by Black Dog & Leventhal, Martha Graham Dance Company: 100 years ($75.00) is a beautifully produced tome with both colour and black-and-white shots. Breathtaking new images of the dancers who are now leading the choreographer’s legacy forward are juxtaposed with archive images, presenting a dialogue between past and present, focusing on 24 of Graham’s most famous works. 

In the preface Janet Eilber, director of the MGDC since 2005, writes, “It may surprise people that Martha Graham was a great believer in stillness. Though she was recognized as the genius of an entirely new way of moving. The many tableaus and moments of arrested motion in her choreography testify to this. She taught us that when the body is stationary, the inner life can provide intense psychological movement – the growing fury, crushing grief, deepening desire, dawning recognition, or any number of emotional revelations that can stop us in our tracks.” 

There is also a special connection between the co-author Deborah Ory with the priestess of modern dance, as she began attending the Martha Graham Dance School as a teenager. “When I was in high school,” says Ory, “my mother had taken me to see the Martha Graham Dance Company perform. I had grown up studying ballet and jazz, but seeing the Graham company for the first time changed the way I thought about dance. I had never seen dancers move this way; with such power and force, yet still so graceful and elegant. The dancers were barefoot and muscular and seemed to move effortlessly from high jumps and leaps in the air and back to the floor again. They commanded the stage in a way I had not experienced, and it took my breath away. I could feel the energy in the theater and was eager to see more. I started taking Graham classes the next day and was fortunate enough to have Peter Sparling at the University of Michigan, former Graham principal dancer, as my first Graham teacher. I studied Graham for years and while I never pursued it as a career, her works have been an important influence on my life and my art. Her works feel as important today as when they were created. The messages of women’s empowerment, personal struggles, or triumph and identity, and the human psyche, all feel so timeless.” It felt inevitable, then, for this duo of famous photographers, who have been focusing on immortalising dancers for f ifteen years now, to include a monograph on Graham among their iconic collection of images. However, this time round they have come up with something slightly different.

“Almost all of our previous works”, Ory and Browar explain, “had been shot in a studio, where we have had the opportunity to work closely with the dancer. The studio also allows you to work without distractions and affords you the luxury of being able to control every element of the image. For this book, however, we wanted to capture the message behind Martha Graham’s works. Some of those works seemed like they would be better outside in nature, so we decided to take it outdoors. We found spots in nature that quite nicely replaced the set design of a performance. Martha Graham’s distinctive movement helps give the book continuity through all of the photos and across locations”. Leafing through the pages of the draft preview volume we were sent, we could sense the depth of history in it, the bridge with the present, and how bodies have been forged through her technique, while glimpsing undisputed masterpieces and little-known works. “Martha Graham created 181 ballets in her lifetime, but many of them are no longer performed and many of them have been ‘lost’, since they were originally choreographed over 100 years ago. Some of the ballets were re-imagined by the Graham company, pieced together using photographs and notes. Among these lost ballets, we have captured Immediate Tragedy, Ekstasis, and Imperial Gesture. We photographed many of the works in the Graham repertory and captured a mix of her early works, such as Lamentation, created in 1930, and ended with Maple Leaf Rag, from 1990, to show the evolution of her work. Maple Leaf Rag was created when Graham was 96 years old, so at the very end of her life, but we felt important to document.” 

--Maria Luisa Buzzi