"Dance is one of the most difficult things to capture because it's all about motion," photographer Matthew Brookes explained. "The challenge is to capture a movement at its climax, and this is almost a gut instinct because it happens so fast."
Brookes has a particularly strong gut instinct when it comes to capturing the fleeting moments of dance. His series, "Les Danseurs," focuses on the beauty of Parisian male dancers, featuring the highly attuned figures twisting and turning in spaces outside of the ballet studio.
To replicate this idea of a "climax," he asked his subjects to mimic the movements of birds falling from the sky. The resulting images feature a beautiful mix of fluttering limbs and achingly exact poses. "I tried to capture the emotion and power of the dancers," Brookes added in an interview with The Huffington Post. "That's what I find fascinating."
Brookes says he was drawn to the world of dance by accident. After a casting friend introduced him to one of the ballet dancers from the Paris Opera, he ended up photographing his first ballet master. "The portrait was such a great experience," he added, so much so that "the dancer asked if I was interested in shooting his friends." Eventually, these portraits became the basis of a deeply personal project, one that, after a few months, became the basis of a book, published earlier this summer.
"In the end, I photographed the ballet dancers for a year between their rehearsals and training sessions," he said.
Brookes notes that outside of dance, he simply enjoys photographing people, following in the footsteps of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber. "I always photograph people. l love to capture the emotion of my subjects, so connecting with them is my biggest challenge and also the biggest reward. It's an exchange so their participation is extremely important."
In "Les Danseurs," this collaboration became vital, as the subjects became responsible for bending their bodies in ways that Brookes, perhaps, could not have imagined himself. See a preview of the stunning series below.
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