 I don't like to read slides on a PowerPoint, but this one I will read because I rail against these flubber artist statements that are full of highfalutin words. This is a very personal statement. I thought I was describing what I do and I realized that I'm describing what I hope to do. So it's not a description of what I do, but it's a mission statement. I document the work and energy that goes into dance, not the final performance. Being in the studio as dances are created or even as dances prepare themselves feels like being in the delivery room when children are being born. Amidst pain or anguish, tempered with rhythm and support and bolstered with faith, new life emerges. It's physical, sometimes sensual, often spiritual. Too often this process is ignored as image makers look only at the final result, the dance. This is a statement of passion. And before we even look at images, I want to say a word about passion and images come to life when we have something to say. I see people come in to a garden or to a historic site or a beautiful space or in front of a loved person and go snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. What are they photographing? They don't know. So let me play, try an exercise with you. Stand up and take a look at this room and at the people around you and get in touch with what you're feeling as you experience this space, the people who are here and some of the people who've been here some time ago and what resides in the bones of this space that communicates to you. And now, and this is a very hard exercise, can you find one picture that you would take that tells that story? And we're not obviously not gonna take it with a camera, but it's that picture that includes the light and part of the ceiling or it's that picture that focuses on the dictionary or it's that picture that looks at the old stand that the modern projector is on or it's that beautifully colored scarf that my wife is wearing or whatever it is. Because that's the exercise that I do that precedes everything I'm gonna show you and that's essential. And for years, I was the resident photographer at the Bates Dance Festival and most of the pictures I'm gonna show you were taken there and these are a set of those pictures that I'm gonna talk about. But I don't only photograph dancers. One morning I went to the farmer's market and there was a melon vendor who had cut up pieces of melons so we could taste them. If there's anything interesting here, I didn't just take one picture and say, I've done it, I played with it. And I said, maybe this, maybe that, maybe if I looked at it this way, maybe if I stood back, maybe if I cropped it and this was a lucky morning because a number of these I think are interesting and useful. Let's look at these images before I talk about how they're made. To me, this is an image of compassion. A ballet teacher looking carefully at a student's feet to say, why is her posture not exactly right? And she's struggling to find an answer. This is a picture of clarity. The yoga teacher not embellished with lots of stuff and lots of complexity, although those of you who practice yoga know that getting to that point is not always a simple journey or energy. What's this a picture of? I think it's a picture of the rapt attention that a wonderful teacher deserves and receives and bounding into the unknown. This is one of my favorite ballet teachers but I think of it as a photograph of a tulip. Okay, whatever we think, I've got an artist license and so do you. I think of this as a picture of fluidity. These dancers have an amazing ability to contort themselves into what they tell me isn't a contortion at all. A level of mastery. This is just a normal simple pose, picture of tenderness, picture of revolution. A dancer from Mwanda who has reason to want a revolution or head reason. I think of this as body perfection. A dancer just at rest takes on an incredible pose and can do that and it doesn't look like just a rest. It looks like something deliberate and beautiful at least to me. I think of this as having something to do with birth and in fact I used this image on a poster to say that I wanted to photograph live births and I said birthing is a dance and most of my friends, men and women loved it. One woman said, Arthur, how do you know? Connection, what's this? I'm not sure but it intrigued me. Ephemeral beauty and even more and this is a picture of I think of frivolity. A good friend of mine runs a dance company called the Equus Project. It's Dancing with Horses and one night at Bates the students did a parody of that and they created the Aquus Project or Dancing with Goldfish. And the choreography actually was very gold fishy. Motion, magic. The choreographer of this piece found this carpet in I think a Target or Walmart. She didn't know why but she just had to buy it and it followed her around for years and one day she looked at it. She said, this is the carpet that holds the energy of strong women. And she said, no, it's the carpet that holds the energy of women who are trapped in the system and can't break free of it. And she had about five other interpretations and so I spent a few hours not watching the dancers but watching the carpet to see what happened as people arrived on this carpet. I think this is a picture of my wandering eye not somebody's clothes. I'm not sure about this. And this is my tribute to Niles Ford, an amazing dancer who died very young and very suddenly. So where did these images come from? How did I create them? And that's what I wanna talk about a little bit. If you have brief questions, feel free to raise your hand and I may answer them as we proceed but I'll certainly try to answer them later. That picture of compassion. I'm fascinated watching how the dance teacher will walk up to a student and bend their body a little bit and push on this a little bit. And it's a kindness. Dancers and other artists learn how to receive feedback. And so I started photographing. This is not a successful picture but it's the beginning of a series. Sometimes just looking at what the teacher sees. I'm saying, do I want to correct that? The hands don't quite complete the circle. One goes up, is that okay? And here is that wonderful teacher from Switzerland looking at a different student trying to hone in on what's going on in another picture of her. And this is very clearly a series that's gonna lead to one of the images. And there weren't just a few pictures, there were many. One of the most insulting comments I ever got was someone who said, Arthur, you take so many pictures, you must get some good ones. But this is not snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. This is, let me look at it this way. No, if I include those women in the picture. Oh, if I'm more on the side and I get a profile. And I'm playing with different ideas and my creativity is unleashed and my judgment is held at bay. Later I will look at them and say, which one of these works best? And if you were quick, you could look at these and say, which do you think is most effective? This is the one that I picked but it doesn't really hold together as a picture. It's sort of vacuous. And then I found that if I just cropped it into a square, it had a new energy. If I go back and look at that picture, just the act of turning it into a square where this isn't quite the diagonal but it almost is. And at this point I said, yes, Arthur, with this picture you're done, now you can live the rest of your life. And my yoga teacher. And she appears in many different ways. Sometimes meditative and sometimes very active. And I show you this, it's more than you can take in individual images but to get a sense of the variety of what I photographed and what was before me. But as I began to delve into what I really wanted, this simplicity of this, I'm not sure I needed the water bottle, the stuff on the left, part of a woman over there. Her eyeglasses, maybe the very fact that she shed her eyeglasses for this might be important. A number of these images are square and that has a strength in works. I'm not dogmatic about any of this stuff. There are people who feel that however you take the picture, that's it, you shouldn't crop it. I think you can do whatever you want with the one exception that if it's for newspaper publication, you can't retouch it. And even if I take out an electrical outlet in the background of this picture, the New York Times would reject it because it's not honest. Even though that electrical outlet has nothing to do with the picture or her and I'm not telling you a lie by not letting you see the outlet. There was in fact an electrical outlet in that picture. But I think I showed you what mattered to me and I think what mattered to her. If I wanted to talk about her interaction with her students, here are two very different pictures that have almost the same structure. How many of you would prefer the one on the left? How many would go for the one on the right? Why the one on the right? Anybody? Pam? Because she's watching the person. So there's a level of connection in there. And the upright arms. But the students' arms are almost going off the curtain and does that matter? Those are the questions that I struggle with. And sometimes I say, Arthur, couldn't you get it right? And this is a dancer who's really pulling his students through some very, very fast movement. And I took series of them as they moved across the floor. And that was the one that I zoomed in on and I didn't feel a need to do much more than just say, that's my image. Now, it's out of focus, not because I'm, it's blurry, not because I didn't focus properly, but because the shutter speed is slow and so there's a bit of blur from the movement. Is that okay? I think it's great. People ask me, how do you photograph, dance, and convey movement? One way is with a blur. One way is, you know, if I'm jumping and I'm leaning over, believe me, I'm not a dancer, I should ask Sharon to do that. There are pictures which could not be static. She's up there for a minute and gravity will pull her right down. But while she's up there, there's a picture and your mind knows that it's about movement. And here is that teacher who commands such attention. Can you find an image here that you really think works? This is the one that I ended up picking. But I had to look very carefully at all of these and that's what I ended up with. What a cacophony. It's an unruly mob of students and the teacher barely stands out. And I don't do a lot with Photoshop manipulating images, but on this one I said, you know, the picture is of the presence of the teacher and the gaze of the students. I said, what if I turned everything except the teacher to black and white? Or in this case, black and white sepia. I haven't touched the image, but all of the sudden there is a teacher and a group of students and now what we see is not the cacophony of their arrangement, but that they are all zeroed right in on her. And that's the story that I wanted to tell that experienced dancers working with a teacher totally focus and get it. And if I were trying to tell the story of why you should work with this teacher or go to this dance festival, this is the kind of image I'd want to take. A set of images is I was watching a ballet class and for a while I was distracted by that red, what do you call that? It's not a leotard, body suit. There's a proper word for it. But my eye is all over the place. Somehow in that cropped was one image that tells a different story than that first image, but it's a real story that's embedded in that class and another class with a lot of energy and I was fascinated with this woman with the purple top. And this was another one of those images. I said, Arthur, you held the camera too low, you didn't get her arms. Do you agree with me? Sometimes we need to sleep on it. We need to think. And there were other images. I said, that's exactly right. This image is as much about her being up there in the clouds as it is that her feet are no longer on the ground. And I think it's perfect. But I had to wake up in order to see that. So I may be in a hurry to circle some images and say, I want to work with that, I like it. But I should not be in too much of a hurry to say I don't want to work with this. It's no good, I'm gonna throw it out. One of my, I think one of my best images was sitting around the studio when the wonderful curator Bruce Brown was visiting me as he often does. And he said, that's wonderful. And I said, Bruce, why? It lacks this and it lacks that. He said, Arthur, look at it carefully. And I had to look at it a few more times to see what he saw. We need colleagues and we need mentors. And we need guides. Here is my favorite ballet teacher. And yes, there were a lot of images tracing how she went through this piece. And I zeroed in on a couple. Now how did I get to this image? Most of what I've shown you, that was a very deliberate creative process. I was gonna hang a show of images from the previous year at the Bates Dance Festival in a gallery just outside her studio. And I don't usually ask dancers for approval, but ballet dancers are particularly concerned that they have it right and there is a right. And the leg should be turned in or turned out. Yes, it does matter, right? Jerome's nodding, certifying what I just said. I could not reach her to ask her. And I said, are her hands in the right position? Does that matter, Jerome? I mean, depending on what, I mean, for the image or for the dancer? For the dancer. Generally for ballet dancers. Yeah. So I looked more carefully and I said, I don't need to include her hands. That tulip dress tells the whole story. So some external story drove that image and it's one of my favorites. I put it on the cover of my book. And another young woman dancer, not that young, just filled with energy and vibrance and almost a crazy display of rearranging the body in all sorts of ways. I feel gifted to have this access to dancers and gifted to be able to work with these. It demands a real respect for the dancer because I can't know what's on their mind but I wanna find the integrity and appreciation of what's in my mind so that that's embedded in the image. I call that a picture of mastery because I just marvel at some of the poses that these dancers don't struggle to get into. They've spent so much time perfecting their balance, loosening their muscles and doing everything else that this is part of their vocabulary. Well, maybe this is a little exceptional but not that much. And in one of the dance studios, here are two instructors choreographing a piece about their relationship. And I was as concerned here about the background and how they fit into it as I was about the dancers themselves. And again, I'm showing you a tiny fraction of what I photographed and you can look at this and say, which of these would you work with? And they're all plausible. They're all well exposed, reasonably well composed pictures. That's what I ended up with. So sometimes the story is some manipulation, some Photoshop work, turning things to black and white or sepia. Sometimes it's just finding the right image and printing it well without cropping, without a lot of retouching. And this was the picture I called Revolution. And in fact, this dancer is dancing under a noose and a white cloth and I forget what the third piece was. And the text of the background says, fear help truth. This is one of those that says motion. I don't think that there are many people who could hold that pose for more than a few seconds. But it seems to be static. And his energy juxtaposed against these angles is what I think makes this picture work. So sometimes it's not just a visual thing. I need to ask myself, what are the elements of the picture that I wanna preserve and why? So people imagine that your task of photographing is to take a bunch of pictures. No, it's first to know, what am I photographing? What's the mission here? Then to take those pictures. Then to look real carefully and say, which ones work in the way that I want? And then what if anything do I need to do? It might be as simple as cropping, which you could learn to do in five minutes. It could be something much more sophisticated. I'm fascinated with how these, not these, how dancers just in the way they hold their bodies command attention and create something. If Avner or the eccentric were in this room, just walking with a broom across the stage and back, you would be mesmerized. If I walked across with a broom and back, you'd be bored. What's he doing? I don't know, but it's magic and it's special. I see the same thing with these dancers, although it's not as common. And always you find a set of images which are interesting, they're all plausible. Any one of these stand out for you? Anybody? I would take the figure with the red stripes in the lower right and isolate her. So you just focus on her, and you really see her musculature rearranged. In fact, the image, and I could work with that and I could have worked with all of these. This is the one that I chose to print, but that's just what I chose, there's no Arthur Fink certification there. I had a teacher who, one warning said, we're gonna create a special tool. It's called the context reducer. And we're all very excited. All that it was was a piece of paper with a spectacular hole in the middle. So if I just held that piece of paper over this, I could look at this one and that one and that one and that one. It gets in the way to see all four images at the same time. And I showed you this image which I related to birth. But here again, it's a matter of selecting. You can see that I'm fascinated with the various movements and the various poses. And it's rare that I will only take one picture. I will, if I wanted to take a picture of how you all relate to this projector, I might take that and I might move over here and I might go down so that there's a lot of glare and that you're sort of in the white and I might come back up here and I might wanna go over to the side or photograph from another angle. And they're all plausible and I might not know at the time which one I'm gonna work with. But I wanna play and I wanna dance with my eyes. And although I'm a fellow who's never felt comfortable in his body, I feel like I'm dancing most of the time when I have a camera. Birthing is a dance. How do you know? Sometimes I find an image like this where there isn't time or opportunity to take that series. I learn a lot more about my own photography and other peoples by looking at what we used to call these contact sheets. Cause literally we took the negatives, put them on a piece of photographic paper and shined a light on it and developed it. So they were done in contact with the film. Now it's an index print, but the word contact sheet still sticks. And this shows much more of the creative process. In fact, the first real dance photography session that I did when I just moved to Portland, I looked at those contact sheets and then they really were contact sheets from a camera. And I thought they were just, they're filled with good images, but they were very autobiographical. It showed I photographed the dancer and then I moved and then she moved and then I moved back and then she stayed there and moved there and moved there. And then I came in and I could trace that. And I blew up that contact sheet so that instead of it being eight by 10, it was 20 by 24 and framed it. And to this day, it's one of my favorite images. So with all of these series of images, sometimes they're one of a kind images. They're not just grab shots because although I'm not thinking consciously, how do I wanna rearrange this and what am I doing and blah, blah, blah. All that knowledge is subliminally working through me. What do you think? Usable, useful? Sometimes there's a picture I wanna take and there's other stuff that's in the picture and where I'm standing and in the situation I'm in, I end up taking more than I want. All that I really needed to do here was crop out what I didn't want and wow. Go back for a minute. Now I also did a little bit with Photoshop to bring up the intensity, the brilliance of the colors and that's not hard to do. And the New York Times wouldn't complain about that. They just don't want me to take out electrical outlets or rearrange reality. But I had to find the geometry that was there in the original picture and say that along with her movement, which here is so revealed. And you can see that she's standing on her left foot, her right foot is swinging. I think that's right, left and right. I may have it reversed. And so one looks very faint, but one foot is solidly on the ground. Most of the time when we look at a picture like this, I don't think we look at it and parse it so analytically. We get the feeling of it and that's exactly right. And you get the feeling you have, it may not be the feeling that I imagined you would have or hoped you would have. There was one image here that totally excited me and it was very different in kind from all the rest. And when I took my context reducer, that's what I found. Sometimes your subjects are fairly still and the picture is there waiting for you to compose it. And I did and I didn't need to do a lot beyond that except love the image and love the whole endeavor. Now actually that's not strictly true. The image as I shot it was a little bit dark, lightening it up, perhaps too much here, totally changes the feeling of it and this carpet. You can decide for yourself what power it really has. But the choreographer knows for herself what power she's using in her choreography. And here I tried doing what I did with that teacher turning most of the world black and white. People talk about this as manipulating with Photoshop. And I say, no, I'm restoring what I saw. What I saw was a brilliant carpet and people who for a moment appeared on it and left and appeared and left and others came. So here I'm getting it right. I'm restoring the feeling that I had as I watch this. And if I've, I've reduced a whole bunch of colors to shades of black and white, but I think of that as a restoration. And that image that I talked about as my wandering eye was in the midst of a hodgepodge of interesting images that I couldn't follow with the same seriousness in the same series. And I don't know what to say about some of these images. So I'm putting them on here. Some of them may excite you and some may bore you. And I assume that's true for the pictures that you take as you look at them. Some you say, why did I even take that and others, that's really exciting. Get a larger print of the ones that really excite you, put it on your refrigerator or your wall or do something with it so you really look at it and look at the ones that disappoint you and ask yourself, what could I have done that would have helped me bring that scene to life? And you can be your own teacher. This was a series that I shot at a dress rehearsal at Bates and the next night in the performance we got about 12 seconds into it and the dancer didn't trip. She doesn't, none of us could figure out what happened but she got a serious injury to her leg and she couldn't go to perform it in Moscow three weeks later and we spent the night looking at these pictures. So sometimes pictures have a life other than the life that you intended. It's gorgeous dancing and there are two wonderful dancers. The woman is now the head of the dance department at the Boston Conservatory and no, they're not holding back in their dancing. They're dancing full force. Yes. Was photographing dance always your favorite thing or did you photograph other things prior to this? Well, I certainly, before dance I took a lot of other pictures and I still do but dance has become a particular passion and a particular love and it's also a particular skill that I've developed that I think is rare so I cultivate it and try to learn more and try to teach it and I offer workshops. And one that I offer it's not strictly about the photography I call it seeing dance like a photographer and give somebody a camera and put them in a dance studio watching a practice or a performance they'll look for the highest leap the most beautiful arabesque and say wait, what picture tells the story of that dance? So I will have arranged for a dancer or a small group to do a short performance maybe five minutes and then I'll say what would you photograph? Just like I asked you, what would you photograph in this room? That's really hard. And then I say okay, you can take notes, let's dancers can you do that again? Then I'll say get on stage with the dancers and feel free to go right up and say I wanna take that picture that shows mostly his hat but part of his eyeglasses. And then I'll ask are these pictures idiosyncratic or are these about the essentials of what the dance is and how do the dancers feel about what we're saying? Are we really capturing what they're doing? It's largely about how would you photograph dance and how would a dancer decide how she or he wants to be photographed? So it's become something that I really focus on. Recently I'm just beginning to photograph other people for whom their movement is not their primary thing. I spent two days with Emily Isaacson who was a choral conductor. And this is not the end point, the end point is the beautiful music that results. But what do I see as I watch her? And I'm just beginning to learn that. Is that? Dan. All right, so what seems totally fascinating to me is that you can capture motion and you do that in a couple of different ways. You capture motion by stopping it right in the middle like the lower left corner there. Real clarity and force. And then you can catch it by having it make the person invisible in the motion like the other one on the far right corner. And I think it's fascinating that both of those things can convey motion powerfully. I'm fascinated with that. And I'm fascinated that I have no particular desire to shift from still photography to video. I could, my camera will shoot video. It's an art form that I deeply respect. I don't reject it. But I have plenty of creative freedom here in just the way that Pam suggested. Yes. You mentioned the New York Times a couple of times during your talk. Do you provide them with some of your photographs? Very few. I mention them just as emblematic of the newspaper world. And image manipulation is a huge issue. And the journalistic standards have drawn a very clear line. I mean, there's a lot of expressive power in what lens I use and where I stand. And using Photoshop to lighten or darken or intensify or soften the colors or maybe turn it to black and white. But as soon as I move or remove something, I've gone over that line. And I mean, recently Trump circulated videos of Nancy Pelosi in which they made her speech sound slurred and her speech wasn't slurred. And the huge debate, should they be taken down? Were they taken down or why weren't they taken down? And where does truth lie? If I take a picture of one of you holding a fishing pole with the fish three feet out, the fish might look almost as big as you are. Is that true? Well, it's exactly the perspective that I got. But I faced that question years ago when I had a photo studio in a small town and I was asked to photograph a young woman who had been beaten. And if I just put her under fluorescent light, you could barely see the scar. And if I put a spotlight along the side, you could see the texture of the wound. And I wanted to do that to show that she was beaten and she was wounded. But at what point am I exaggerating it? And that was a question I asked myself. And I can hear some people who say, no, you're showing what's there and others who would say, yes, up to a point. Other questions or comments? I think that that brings one of the thoughts I had is it's the interpretation in a way you're an interpreter of the arts because your connection with the dancer is its own story. And then dance in its ephemeral quality, we could be watching something together. And what you're seeing, you're then giving in your still image, whether it's in motion with clarity or in motion with blur. But your image is then, I forget what word you, replacing what you had seen. I thought that was an interesting way to do it because in a way, nobody knows what the dancer's thinking. Yeah, and I don't know unless you choose to tell me. Right, and oftentimes, although it could be the same dialogue, you're in a different day. And so I just find it fascinating with your immense ability to capture the connection and to see the dancer, but then to offer that image because now it's sort of like breaking the fourth wall. Now, each of us sees your image but not and the dancer, but might have understood something else in that moment. Now, Sharon is a dancer whom I photographed a number of times. To what extent are those pictures about you and to what extent are they about me? That's the interpretation that's exactly what I was thinking about as you were talking about truths and what is it that I'm capturing? And I think that as long, I think that that's one of the beauties of how you do your work is you're asking those questions without any judgment of just, well, it is what it is. Or at this moment, it's what I'm capturing. Now, some of the work that I did with Sharon has a different element added to it. That's when we were working together actually upstairs and I took some pictures and then I showed them to her in the camera, so it was very rough. Said, Sharon, is this capturing what you want to say? And she could nod to some and say, if you could only X, Y, Z. So it becomes a collaboration. And there I do get to listen to what the dancer says. And the dancer may sometimes be amazed, that's not a judgment positive or negative, what I saw. Other comments or questions? Yeah. I found it fascinating when you said when you have the camera you feel more connected to your body or more in your body. Could you speak a little more about that? Yeah. Well, there are two parts to that. One, I said that I'm sort of out of body. I mean, if you asked me what it was like growing up, I'd say I didn't like it when they threw the ball at me. I didn't say to me, I said at me. Like, it's a foreign object and I'm powerless and I'm not coordinated enough to believe that I'm gonna catch it. And then I watched dancers in the studio and their coordination, their movement, the flexibility but precision of their bodies is absolutely astounding to me. And it's always, I can't feel envy because I can't imagine a pathway that would get me to that point. But it's a deep appreciation and I feel blessed to be in their presence. But I'm often in the situation of photographing a dancer in motion, especially in a piece that I haven't seen before. And I just noticed that seemingly effortlessly, I follow them. And they move and I move and it's as if we're connected. I mean, what would we do if we were social dancing? We might hold each other loosely or might not but it's like there's a rod between your eye and mine and I didn't look away, I didn't lose you. So it's not the same but I feel totally at home. And my wife has asked me sometimes, you have so many dance pictures, why do you need to take more? And it's a good question. And I have a lot of dance images that I've barely discovered, barely worked with. But the process of being blessed to be with dancers and to go through that process and it's a totally creative process is exhilarating to me and I'm at home. Is that speaking to you? And I hope that other people have some activity that is so grounding, so heartwarming, so satisfying. It's not to say that I come away delighted with every photo shoot and there are times when I say, where were you Arthur? And sometimes I was so mesmerized by what I saw that I forget that I need to compose good images. I've learned to try to keep my focus on the photographic process as well as the experience. But so even though it can be hard and demanding and not always successful, it's joyful. Yeah. And you speak of it very spiritually, this concept of the photographing dancers, do you have that experience when you photograph other things or is it mostly the dance that the spiritual aspect comes through? Thank you for that question. I recently had an article published, the title was, the dance studio is my other meeting house. I'm a Quaker, so the reference is to the Quaker meeting house. And yes, the dance work, I understand it to be extremely spiritual. And when I was photographic, Emily Isaacson conducting, there was an element of that. It was also so difficult. I was on stage with all the singers because I couldn't be in the audience looking at her back. I had to see her conducting. But it was such a complex space, I was working really hard. So that diminished some of the lightness. You know, I will do, when I'm in New York, I will do a lot of street photography. Sometimes just with my iPhone, which has got more resolution than the cameras used to take some of those pictures. But I think the honest answer is that for me personally, for a reason that I can't explain, the spiritual nature of that work with dance is present in a way that's not there for anything else. And it doesn't stop me from taking other pictures and sometimes taking very good ones. Well, I showed you that at the beginning, but I didn't feel that I was dancing with melons. I mean, you know, they're inanimate, they're beautiful. They found that some of them found their form not because someone arranged them, but because as they were cut, they fell into place. There's a lot of miracle in those pictures and I probably should resurrect those and print some of them, which I've never done. But it doesn't hit here. It's interesting, I see a similarity actually between your watermelon pictures and your dance pictures to the extent that you also have a ready eye for pattern. So some of your dance pictures, the pattern is what is popping out of you. Let me put in a plug for a group that some people call it pedicure and some people call it pachakacha and I sidestepped the whole thing and I just call it PK. But you may have heard of it, people share 20 images and with each image part of their talk. And I've given a lot of those and I work with the group and I did one in which I showed a number of my father's images and how I learned from him. And he was a graphic designer, he loved typography, he designed a lot of common products that you're used to seeing. And so there's a lot of linear, you know, if I were to take some of these pictures or some of the dance pictures you see, there's a diagonal running through that. This is bisecting and there is a line here. And as I took that, I don't think I thought about that. As I look at it now, I don't think it's an accident. As a kid we'd spend gobs of time at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Metropolitan. And I didn't think about this too much until recently. And a lot of time at the room were most of the de Ga images and mostly sculptures were. So, you know, I took a photography class with one teacher and we began by talking about the first visual things we remember seeing. Well, you know, those sculptures of dancers with the silk skirts that were in shreds but still present weren't the first things I saw but they were some of the most moving things I saw. And I guess they were implanted in me. But for me at least ballet is not two twos and long skirts. It's an excessively formal but still beautiful endeavor. Does that speak to? Any other? How did you find yourself to become a photographer of dance? And when and how did you start to step into the studio with dancers? So I was moving to Portland from a small town in New Hampshire. And there I had a room almost the size of this area up to the desk. And so I used part of it as a photo studio and I was also doing consulting work which is what I do now. But I decided in moving to Portland that I was gonna let go of the consulting and just be a photographer. And I never thought about dance. And in those days we didn't have desktop publishing so I hired a graphic designer to do my identity set. And she said, Arthur your work is so bold and so graphic. Photograph something like dancers and we can use those images on your business card and your letterhead and so forth. So I bought some dancers into my studio which was a huge living room in my home. And did exactly that. And that's where I felt that first thrill. And when I looked at the contact sheets it was like coming home spiritually. So and then I began to seek out and my wife helped me find some connections to seek out opportunities to photograph dance. And then I looked around and said, where do I find dance in and around Portland? And all paths lead to the Bates Dance Festival. And I went to Laura Forre. And bless her, she is very protective of the dance space and of people especially men who wanna come and gawk and make noisy sounds with their cameras. She said, well after a few years, well okay you can come but you can only photograph this and only and just, wait did I leave that? And I said, okay so I came for a day. And I went home and stayed up half the night printing index prints. And then what happened is when I went back to her office the next day Gantzer started crowding in looking at them fascinated to see how they appeared in my images and how somebody else another artist saw them. And so I realized that what I was doing was not taking pictures, I was sharing images. And the social part of it was a critical element. And I mentioned that because those two things together contributed to this. And at that point the floodgates opened at Bates and every night I would go through the images and print six or eight that I thought were successful sometimes it was more and I'd post them on this long bulletin board in the Bates Commons. And by the end of the summer the whole bulletin board about four feet by 32 feet was filled with images. But the whole festival was aware of them and was looking at them and was reacting in some way to them. And that's what I want. I don't want to just be the recorder. And I wonder what role photography can play even more actively than that.