Being approached by the mighty Royal Opera House, to collaborate on creating a fresh way of photographing dance, was both awe-inspiring and terrifying for Giles Revell.   Taking reference from pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, from Eadweard Muybridge , Étienne-Jules Marey and William Edgerton, all famed for their contribution to photography at different stages of the 19th and 20th century, including the development of fast shutters, stroboscopes and the high speed flash enabling the capture of the previously unseen.

Revell’s imagery blurs the boundary between stills photography and moving image. Treating a movie camera like a strobe. The work captures two principal ballet dancers, as they interpret an aria, exploring their delicate and subtle expression of body movement. Emotion, narrative, pace, and acceleration, are all revealed by a staggered interval of multiple images over time. 

It is a viewpoint of raw, in-the-moment beauty, as each frame is expressed with exquisite accuracy and lit with exceptional precision, in a style where the human form is abstracted, but just at the point of recognition. Conversely, the work is forensically technical in its methodology and lighting, to enable the dancers, and art not to be! Allowing the viewer to be seduced by a non-scientific record of pure artistic beauty. 

DANCER