Ballerina in Providence

I had a photo shoot with one of the dancers of the Festival Ballet Providence, Eugenia Zinovieva. This was an extension of an idea I had for quite a while where I wanted to photograph the dancer in a different environment than the stage or studio. Eugenia was interested in the idea and approached me to arrange a shoot. I thought it would be interesting to use downtown Providence as the backdrop and use one of the public art pieces that I call the “Steel Donut”.  To contrast her soft, flexible, organic body against the hard, edgy, inorganic sculpture and use the strong lines of the city as accents where appropriate.

I wanted to shoot near the sunset and Eugenia and I scouted the area a week before the shoot. She liked the idea and we started shooting close to 7 PM on August 19, 2013 and continued until a little after 8 PM. Eugenia struck some poses, she accommodated my request for special poses where I wanted to create highly angular body shapes, you will see them in the collection. She has a signature pose where she pulls one of her legs from behind over her head, en pointe on the other foot. Towards the end we worked to get that pose in and you will see how she moves towards that and then the complete pose. Early on she struck that pose inside the steel donut, mimicking the angular segments of the sculpture with her knee and elbow.

As I processed the photographs I shared them with Eugenia and she chose a collection of her favorites. I finalized editing those and shared them with her. You may see some on facebook as she decides to share them there. To that collection I added a few that were not appealing to her from a dance point but attractive to me from a photographic perspective and decided to process them further to augment the incongruity of seeing a ballerina on the streets of Providence. The collection you will see here are processed to resemble the cross-processed photographs of the film days where, by accident or deliberate intention, photographers developed a type of film in developers meant for a different type. Processing color negative film in a slide film developer, or Kodachrome in Ectachrome baths would produce unexpected results where colors would somewhat shift and look edgy. The wrong appearance of the colors in this collection is intentional and the result of the special processing I applied to them for this result.

Before viewing the photographs, take a look at the short bio of Eugenia, a very good dancer and equally good photography model willing to try different things. Thank you Eugenia for a great photo shoot.