Distilling Martha Graham’s Dance in Photographs

To create each photograph, Morgan would first absorb each dance—watching hours of studio practices, exercises, dress rehearsals, and live performances, and listening to the accompanying music.³ She would then distill a dance into a few essential gestures or themes.⁴ It was during this period that Morgan abandoned her tripod and turned to the adaptable Speed Graphic 4 × 5 camera, which allowed her to move along with each of Graham’s movements—both choreographer and photographer dancing for the camera.⁵ “We’d chant together, 1-2-3, or whatever, so we’d get in rhythm together,” Morgan described. “Then I would put chalk where the moment was and then I’d get the camera.”⁶

The third of the 16 dances in the photobook, Ekstasis, emerged from Graham’s revelation of the “pelvic thrust”—a gesture which became crucial to her artistic lexicon. Graham described the moment of revelation that took place in her Ninth Street studio:

I was alone and working and suddenly I discovered the pelvic thrust. I felt it was very important. It was the basis of Ekstasis, and the beginning of a cycle of distortion, not for distortion’s sake but for deeper meaning and feeling. Before Ekstasis, maybe I had been using a more static form, trying to find a ritualist working of the body. This new discovery led me to what I am today, to the technique.⁷

Ekstasis is the result of Graham working out the mechanics of her technique—through bodily contractions, shifts, and “distortions.” The pelvic thrust configures Graham’s famous concept of contraction and release—defined as the exhalation of breath (the contraction) and the inhalation (the release)—originating from the deep pelvic muscles.⁸

To make this photograph, Morgan sought to do more than, as she put it, “fortuitously record.”⁹ Instead, she thought it necessary “to redirect, relight, and photographically synthesize” in order to achieve what she felt to be “the core of the total dance.”¹⁰ Morgan photographed Graham not during her live performances, but instead held her photographic sessions at locations across the city—at the New York Guild Theater, Columbia University’s McMillan Theatre, the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, and Morgan’s own studio overlooking Madison Square. In these controlled settings, Morgan could manipulate the lighting, timing, composition, and sequencing of each photograph.

“Light is to the photographer what movement is to the dancer,” Morgan wrote, “the active principle without which there can be no photograph, as without movement there can be no dance.”¹¹ Morgan used overhead and back lighting to create an interplay of light and shadow, allowing for psychological overtones, architectural framing, or a sculptural modeling of the figure that would free it in space.¹² The resulting photograph “epitomizes my feeling for the dance,” Morgan later reflected, “the side and back lighting frees and solidifies the sculptural form; the tonal shift of the triangle of light projects distance and supports a rhythmical monumentality.”¹³ Light accents and abstracts Graham’s body, creating a serpentine shape. Morgan’s cropped image reveals only her torso, severing the dancer’s head, neck, arms, calves, and feet from the frame, just as Graham thrusts—and so too “distorts,” as she describes it in her revelation of the pelvic thrust—her own body in dance.