Elizaveta Porodina’s Vivid Portraits of the Dancers of New York City Ballet

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New York City Ballet by Elizaveta Porodina
Unity Phelan of NYCBPhotography by Elizaveta Porodina

Produced in collaboration with New York City Ballet, Elizaveta Porodina’s Technicolor photographs respond to the unique energy of each dancer

Elizaveta Porodina, the Munich-based photographer, is on a video call to talk about her new body of work for New York City Ballet’s Art Series. When I first looked through these photographs, I turned my laptop brightness all the way up – an attempt to fast-track the yellow, magenta and cyan directly into my retina (this impulse reminiscent of when The Wizard of Oz was on TV and I’d press my nose up against it, the colour doing something akin to the forbidden E numbers in blue M&Ms). Although I’m seeing Porodina’s images digitally, they have that same sugar-chemical materiality of the Technicolour film greats: The Wizard of Oz of course, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno too, but also, and perhaps most fitting for the subject matter, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

These 24 photographs were produced in collaboration with NYCB’s associate artistic director Wendy Whelan and repertory director Craig Hall, with Porodina capturing company dancers in various solos, duets and trios. The context through which the dancers move is colour itself. And when an arm lifts, or back bends, it drags the colour with it, revealing another layer behind. Porodina explains her use of colour, line and long exposure sought to “capture movement as a graph”, but also respond, on a case-by-case basis, to the energy of each dancer.

Porodina has regularly worked with dancers and performers for over 15 years, however, this was her first time on set with multiple choreographers: “I have a lot to say about movement … Usually I am my own movement director,” she says. But working with Wendy and Craig, she found the experience “seamless and fluid”. She’d suggest a movement, they’d pull from their rolodex of dance history. While some virtuoso poses come straight from the classical canon – an arabesque, a pirouette, a romantic pas de deux – other more modernist forms (with expressive upturned wrists and ornamental fingers) suggest the impish Nijinsky as Harlequin in Fokine’s Carnaval. This combination of classical ballet, carnival and showtime glamour is embodied in House of Iconica’s costumes: jester-like masks, gloves, buoyant capes, rhinestones and of course, red shoes.

Porodina – who has previously shot for AnOther and Dazed; brands including Armani, Dior, Chanel, Carolina Herrera; and shown in galleries and museums including Fotografiska – first collaborated with the NYCB for their 2024 Ballet Unbound campaign. Now, the full series of photographs is on view at the Lincoln Centre in New York. The photographer enjoys watching her work shapeshift between contexts: “I always tell [magazines] I want to see how they crop it differently. I want to see a different perspective. When I take a picture I connect to it most when I imagine my younger self in my bedroom with it as a poster on the wall”. In the Lincoln Centre, Porodina’s images take on another guise, with 18 of them blown up to 165 metres tall, hung throughout the atrium, illuminated and transparent. 

The New York City Ballet’s Art Series programme has for 12 years been strengthening connections between visual artists and dance, and such interdisciplinarity is in the NYCB’s lifeblood (founder George Balanchine was in circles with Picasso, and beyond the ballet, 1960s New York saw collaborations between leading choreographers and visual artists from Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg to Simone Forti and Robert Morris). Porodina welcomes that non-hierarchical spirit. “I personally think that every single person that picks up a crayon [or] starts dancing is an artist one way or another.” 

Art Series has found that tens of thousands of new patrons have, through this initiative, been introduced to the ballet, in turn expanding the Company’s demographic make-up. Porodina too hopes her work will bring people in, and allow them to go deeper: “I want these pictures to give people windows and doors and flight opportunities … the work, and what it can do, should be approachable. It can be incredibly beautiful. It can be gigantic.”

New York City Ballet: Art Series by Elizaveta Porodina is on show at the David H Koch Theatre at Lincoln Centre in New York until 2 March 2025.