Rangefinder Magazine

Profile: Greg Barrett
Master of the Precise Moment
by Judith Bell

Jete, pirouette, releve, arabesque. These movements, only a fraction of those that make up the special language of ballet , may be among the most difficult of all to capture on film. Not so, however, for Australian photographer Greg Barrett. He proves his special gift in spades in Tutu, a stunning photographic record of the company of the Australian ballet. Challenging himself to escape the restraint and formality of formal performances and choreography, Barrett, channeled the enormous creative and physical energy of these artists into an unprecedented visual record of the tenuous balance between physical discipline and artistic expression.

One of Australia’s foremost photographers, Barrett has worked extensively in film direction and fashion, advertising and portrait photography. I had the opportunity to talk with him while he was in New York.

Rangfefinder: How did Tutu come about? Did you have a relationship with the Australian Ballet?

Barrett: I work with most of the dance companies in Australia like Bangarra, the indigenous aboriginal dance company. They are quite extraordinary. They’ve just been in New York with the Australian Ballet doing the Rite of Spring. I have a connection also with the Sydney Dance Company. I’ve established myself as one of the foremost dance photographers in Australia.

Rangfefinder: How long ago did you get involved in dance photography?

Barrett: I’ve been shooting dances for over 15 years.

Rangfefinder: What was it about this dance that drew you in?

Barrett: I began, as many photographers do, as a fashion photographer. I would get the models moving and I seemed to be adept at this. But once I worked with a dancer who could actually replay anything that I saw, you know, flying past my eyes, and replay that tiny part of it that I wanted. What incredible discipline. I was gone, moving out of fashion fairly quickly (laughter). The trick more for me is catching that precise moment.

Rangfefinder: Had you been photographing members of the ballet? What came first, the book or the work?

Barrett: I’d been working with the ballet. In the middle of the night one night and I thought, ‘this is crazy.’ I know a publisher of books in Australia and I know the ballet, why not put the two together. I just put them together in about a week and they began to talk and it happened very quickly.

Rangfefinder: Tell me about shooting the book and that whole process. That’s fairly intensive work.

Barrett: It’s very intense. I got sick every day, ill with sort of fear and expectation and fear of disappointment and, as much as anything, fear of letting the dancers down. You have 48 dancers and if you don’t get a shot with one then they have to be excluded from the book. It was important to include everyone we shot.

Rangfefinder: So the entire company is in this book?

Barrett: Yeah, the entire company at that time.

Rangfefinder: So, how many people…did you have them scheduled in one half-hour settings? Or, what did you do?

Barrett: We set up near the Sydney Opera House; we had a car running between the Opera House and the studio.

Rangfefinder: Your studio is in Sydney?

Barrett: The studio is in Sydney, yeah. On the other side of town, five kilometers across town so the driver would fight his way through the traffic and he was just doing a run so he would be picking them up, dropping them off, picking them up, dropping off. All day or at least all of the afternoon.

Rangfefinder: So how long did you allow for each dancer?

Barrett: I think we had an hour and a half but the makeup would take three quarters of an hour , so I ended up with maybe three quarters of an hour and if they were late that would cut in as well. So it was, yes, incredibly pressured.

Rangfefinder: Did you know a number of these dancers before you actually shot them for the book?

Barrett: The majority of them I knew, which was great because you’ve got their confidence, and you know they have no reluctance at all to kind of surrendering their eye to you. I mean I work on Polaroid all the time, but they really do have to trust you or you won’t get that new thing. There is a terrible period of silence in which you’re both stuck. I wanted them to be stuck because I realized if we weren’t stuck we wouldn’t make anything new. So I just said to them, don’t worry; if we don’t say anything or if nothing happens for 20 minutes it’s okay. But I don’t want this to be still photographs of existing choreography. I didn’t want to copy a piece from Balanchine. I wanted us to try as hard as we could in the limited time we had to make something completely new. Everyone else has to be the judge of that and whether or not we succeeded to make this fresh thing.

Rangfefinder: And I would imagine it is very liberating.

Barrett: And especially for them with their extraordinary technique to push them beyond the normal way that they would use their bodies. They were using their bodies in a slightly abnormal way to push into this area. Difficult to articulate in words.

Rangfefinder: One thing that surprised me is that you don’t use music on the set.

Barrett: No, they usually want it but they were kind of nervous and didn’t really want it in the background. You see there isn’t any music in the pictures when you look at them on the page. That’s what I am afraid of. You can get all excited and have this fabulous music playing but there is none of that when you open the book. I wanted the pictures to stand on their own.

Rangfefinder: Talk about shooting some of these images.

Barrett: I’d say let it go way beyond where you would normally let it go. Take it to the perfect position and then let it start to fall apart. I said let it fall and don’t go to the point of danger but get as close to it as you can get. And that’s what came out of that. In dance photography, the best image suggests the part before and the part after. That’s why there’s life in the pictures. I hate that frozen moment thing. Where there is a bit of chiffon draped over the arm and they are kind of standing in that mirabelle pose, man kissing the woman. The most frustrating part of the still camera is that sort of flat surface and the fact that it is still. You have to turn that into an advantage. You have to turn the frozen moment into something you can squeeze the life out of.

Rangfefinder: There’s an image with a woman that is almost frog-like. You can see all of the muscles in her foot. The foot is flexed, her hands are webbed in front of her face, and she’s jumping. The thing that is so striking is that her foot is hyper-flexed and you can see all of that muscle.

Barrett: We tried with every dancer to find the thing about them they did best. And every dancer, I would say to them, there must be something that you feel that you do that is fairly unique, a quality, or a part of your discipline that you’re very good at. Each one of them, even the best, would say, there is nothing really. I do not have any unique quality. So I would say, ‘just start to do a few things. Just mess around a bit. Do anything, even if it’s ugly, even if it’s something you have done a thousand times, just do it. And, when the particular dancer started to do it, you could just see this incredible flexibility in her legs.

Rangfefinder: Do you just say, yeah, do more of that?

Barrett: Yes, something like that. It is encouraging it to the point where you have almost got it like that and then I take the Polaroid and really make them push it. There are only two or three frames of that . But they have to dance that night and they are jumping on cement in the studio. Two or three frames is it.

Rangfefinder: Tell me about the technical aspects. What kind of camera were you shooting with?

Barrett: I picked an old beaten up Mamiya 6x7. You would laugh if you saw the camera. And it is quite slow. It goes up to 1/400 second, but the flash duration is 1/2000, so the shutter speed is not important. It is all shot on one lens, a 140mm. I love that lens.

Rangfefinder: Why?

Barrett: Because on the Mamiya it gives you things the way your eye sees it. I think just a tiny bit longer, so you feel abnormally close yet it gives you a fairly regular perspective. There are not any tricks in it at all. There is no distortion.

Rangfefinder: Why did you choose to work in black and white?

Barrett: Because it’s closer to the abstract. You see the shape more than in color.

Rangfefinder: Is it that color can be distracting?

Barrett: Yeah, and in the case of dancers their feet can be knocked around and scarred. That shows up more in color and not in black and white. Thinking about it in retrospect it [dancing] is hard on the feet. It is also quite exertive so they would be getting pretty red in the face. In black and white all of that goes away. I always think black and white is beautiful. And because we were just working with the plain background and the black and white clothes, it was probably better to just go black and white.

Rangfefinder: Are you just working a with a seamless background?

Barrett: No, that’s just working on a cyclorama. Then when they jump high you can see all of the fire extinguishers in the room. At first I tried to avoid them and then I realized that was part of the room.
Rangfefinder: What film did you use?

Barrett: Tri-x. Regular 200 rather than 400.

Rangfefinder: Any reason for that type of film?

Barrett: No, just what I’ve always worked with. I know what it’ll do. I sort of know how to treat it. But, I don’t process it at all. Print or anything like that.

Rangfefinder: How long have you been in the business?

Barrett: I started at age 33.23 years. It feels like ten minutes of course.

Rangfefinder: What were you doing before you got into photography?

Barrett: I was a model for a while and self-educating myself. But I hand no interest in it.

Rangfefinder: What set you on the path of the other side of the camera?

Barrett: Well, my wife was a model, and I picked up a camera and immediately I knew where she should be in the frame. I always wanted to paint but I am too clumsy. I knew straight away that even those early shots have a certain kind of a balance and a slight “offness” to them. And it has been a progression since then.

Rangfefinder: Did you first work in editorial?

Barrett: I had to do a fashion shoot for Cosmopolitan in French Polynesia.

Rangfefinder: This is the Australian Cosmopolitan?

Barrett: Yeah. And so they flew me off with one camera and one lens. I didn’t know what I was doing except that I had to make this girl look beautiful, and that’s how it’s gone on since then.

Judith Bell is an art historian and critic based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in American Photo, Art & Antiques, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Omni, and Photo District News, among others.