Denis Darzacq's 'Street Dancers, Paris' is an arresting, unsettling and bizarre image, but above all it is a manifestation of the slipperiness of the photograph. Sliced out of its time space continuum, or presented without a caption, this picture would not be read as that of a dancer. Even if one has a passing acquaintance with breakdancing, capoeira and parkour, those transgressive physical arts are not the first things this photograph calls to mind. The black clad figure improbably horizontalized against a grimy urban white wall seems more like the figure of death from The Seventh Seal, a flying hooded superhero, the already dead victim of a terrorist street bombing, or a falling suicide seconds before terrible impact.

The freezing of gesture that the camera makes possible creates the ambiguity that challenges the knowledge permitted by our slower eyes. Leaping or falling, flying or dancing, willed or inadvertent, dead or living, joyous or brutally sad, this graphic image is the blank canvas on which we paint our hopes and fears.


--Alison Nordström, Ph.D is curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.