My Best Photo
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Dance and the Soul 1

Place
Dayle Ann Clavin, Austria (AU)
Technical information
Technically I used agfa black and white 100 film, studio lighting, scanned the image at high resolution and adjusted digitally.
 
Text
The photo is entitled Dance and the Soul 1 and is part of a larger series of black and white photos which accompany the Dialogue from Paul Valery. In this famous dialogue, greek philosophers discuss the questions of the body and it's perfection and the effect of the soul as they watch a woman dance. In the end, it is seen that the body sucumbs in exhaustion to the strain of the dance while the soul takes flight and ultimately proves to be the stronger of the two. My photo seems to portray both elements of the body and the soul in the transparency of the print and the movement which suggests a state of ecstasy.I have used the slow shutter speed to capture the movement but wanted the image to have a degree of sharpness, though soft in order to make the struggle between the two realms dicernable. As far as the composition I used the diagonal line to suggest a dynamic movement and placed the dancer in the left side of the frame to allow the eye to follow the line from the upper left to the lower right
allowing a natural path of viewing. The use of black and white gives the
image an element of abstraction.