In photographer Thibaut Grevet’s New York City Ballet Art Series fee, the pictures are structured in phases – “as a dance is” – shifting by way of preparation, repetition, efficiency, relaxation. Each has its personal visible language; shut crops of a dancer’s centered face; full-lengths of soloists beating limbs; group photographs with breezy serpentine asymmetry; and, when color enters, our bodies soak up the chemical yellow of mercury lamps.
13 years into their annual sequence bridging visible artists and dance, the NYCB’s choice to ask Grevet is sensible. Although he’d by no means labored with ballet dancers earlier than – his topics embrace BMX riders and Formula one automobiles, A$AP Rocky and Kim Kardashian – lots of his ‘stills’ maintain motion inside them. Movement, then, is his topic. But in fact, motion can also be that which, for the photographer, troubles the bounds of their medium, a medium that essentially captures and freezes.
Photographers recognise and pull the decisive second from the wash of time. Sometimes, the second is conspicuous – take skateboarding: Grevet explains, “I don’t want to compare [skate videos] to ballet, but at the same time, you need to catch an instant, you need to be able to react and understand the way to position the camera to get the tricks properly. There are rules.” The trick is the {photograph}. But so as to see the trick – itself a sequence of minute gestures, realignments and negotiations between board, toes, floor and air – the {photograph} should signify what got here earlier than and can come subsequent. Too early and also you gained’t know in the event that they landed it, too late and also you miss its raison d’etre.
Enumerable methods have tried to fuse picture and motion, illustration and actuality. They embrace Eadweard Muybridge’s 1870s computerized electro-photographs – from galloping horse to ambulatory girl – and Étienne-Jules Marey’s Eighteen Nineties multiple-exposures of birds in flight and extra strolling girls. In dialog, Grevet notes the affect of Gjon Mili, one of many first to discover the aesthetics of digital flash and stroboscopic gentle within the Forties. The relationship between Grevet’s photos – with ballet dancers’ legs successively layered like spokes on a spinning wheel – and this historical past is palpable. But, in fact, his course of was unplanned. “We were flashing several times when they were dancing, incidentally, creating these kinds of crazy sequence images. It worked because there was a deep black background, the dancers were in white”. And whereas acknowledging “chrono photography, all these kinds of black-and-white flash images”, Grevet’s actual curiosity lay in what “it means to take that approach into 2026”.
Grevet studied graphics, and right here the physique reads as a system of traces and factors in area. It was a pleasure to work with dancers, “the way they use their body, place their hands, the way they gesture – it becomes graphical straight away”. But it was vital that the pictures “were real”. Grevet used “an incredible digital camera made in 2025” and was cautious of post-production. “When I started, I used to go with my backpack and shoot skaters. They’d be in their real environment, trying their own stuff. Nothing was fake. What I love about the ballet is that they are doing what you see – everything in front of my lens was real.”
We speak in regards to the movie he produced alongside the images, which took over 9 months to finish. Nodding to Muybridge’s proto-cinema, the movie performs with stop-motion as dancers scuttle backwards and forwards. “We wanted this frame-by-frame sensation in the film, and stop-motion is how they used to do video back in the day.” And if the images seize the actual, the movie ideas into the surreal with distortion warping and bending the ballet studio structure.
Grevet’s 2023 guide, Blurred, introduced collectively pictures from artwork, vogue, music and sport. His NYCB pictures are being collated right into a second guide, Ballet, saving them from being “sucked into the algorithm”. With a guide, “the picture becomes an object, whereas nowadays you post a picture and the next day it disappears.” Photographs are reckoning with what dance has lengthy come to phrases with – innate ephemerality. Grevet’s work for the NYCB, and the NYCB’s Art Series as an entire, embrace the potential of this enduring pressure – the best way to get better gestures from time, maintain motion in picture and reconcile the irreconcilable; if not eternally, then not less than for a ballet season.
Thibaut Grevet’s work shall be on present at three particular New York City Ballet Art Series performances on January 28, 31, and February 6. The evenings will embrace a ballet efficiency, viewing of the set up, and a post-performance afterparty.