ISO

Philip Trager’s career has been dedicated to the photography of architecture and dancers. He is interested in the structural elements of both subjects and their emotive quality when captured as purely as possible. For photographs of dancers, Trager prefers remote locations with natural light, far from studios and performance venues. In the absence of any other context, we are left simply with suspended, “frozen” bodies caught in the transience of movement. In this work, as in others, the setting renders the dancer’s characteristics—his toned musculature and bodily control—the focus of the image, even more so because he appears to be in midair, dangerously close to the edge of the plateau.