The magic of ballet captured by a master's camera

Only 500 copies of Alexey Brodovitch's Ballet were printed when it was published in 1945, yet this modest artist's book would go on to have a seismic influence on the course of photography. Like the genre's most exceptional works—Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) or Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's Evidence (1977) —Ballet inspired generations of artists and became a cornerstone in the history of photography.

For years, Ballet has been a coveted treasure for collectors, curators, and scholars. Very few copies exist today because a 1956 fire at Brodovitch's home in Pennsylvania destroyed his archive, including photographs and negatives of Ballet and dozens of books. Now, as part of its 80th anniversary, Ballet has been reissued by Little Steidl in a painstaking reconstruction of the original.

Brodovitch, art director of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, was a monumental force in visual design, influencing the look of magazines for decades. He had a distinct visual pedigree. Born near St. Petersburg, Russia, in the late 19th century, he moved to Paris in the 1920s.

There, he accepted graphic design commissions from the fashion houses of Patou, Poiret, and Schiaparelli and painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Working with Diaghilev, he witnessed the impresario's attempt to blend a refined Parisian aesthetic sensibility with the passion of Russian-born choreographers, dancers, and teachers who had found a home in France.

In 1924, he won an innovative design competition with his poster for the annual Bal Banal, beating out Pablo Picasso, who came in second. Despite defeating him, Brodovitch would become friends with Picasso, as well as Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Igor Stravinsky, and the great Ballets Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky .

Brodovitch arrived in the United States in 1929, having been “a captive witness and enthusiastic participant in the symphony of artistic experimentation that was Paris in the 1920s,” wrote Kerry William Purcell in his 2002 book about Brodovitch’s life and work. Drawing on ideas from those modern art movements, Brodovitch turned Harper’s Bazaar into an incubator of original graphic design that reflected the dry philosophical wit of Dada, the canny geometries of the Le Stijl movement, and a constructivism that imbued structure and form with social purpose.

Some of these ideas came from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a landmark of the early 20th century that emphasized collaboration between different artistic disciplines.Diaghilev ’s commissioned The Rite of Spring , scored by Stravinsky and choreographed by Nijinsky, was so provocative that the production led to riots at its Paris premiere in 1913: hostile audiences booed the dancers, and some walked out. The New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce, reviewing a 1980 biography of Diaghilev, wrote: “It seemed that at that moment art was enormous—world-important, visionary—in a way it has never been since.”

Brodovitch had absorbed the company's avant-garde spirit, evident in his bold approach to the use of images in Harper's Bazaar. The magazine's pages were the photography gallery of the first half of the 20th century, and Brodovitch used his Design Lab, the influential course he taught at the New School, as a breeding ground for new talent. The roster of photographers—including Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Lisette Model, and Garry Winogrand—who passed through the lab constitutes the core of the New York School. Several studio photographers were also present, notably Richard Avedon and Lillian Bassman.

And Brodovitch took another example from Diaghilev: “Amaze me!” was the impresario’s directive to dancers and choreographers, and Brodovitch also used it when commissioning photographers for the magazine.

Brodovitch’s only book, Ballet , contains 104 photographs—taken in New York in the late 1930s—of the Ballets Russes companies that formed after Diaghilev’s death in 1929. The poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, whose essay is reprinted in the new edition, wrote: “There are many magnificent moments which seemed to be the afterglow of Diaghilev’s 30-year epic and the end of a milieu of the dance we knew as the Ballets Russes, or Russian ballet.”

Denby also describes the artistic ambition with which Ballet was conceived. Brodovitch, he wrote, “was trying to capture the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet possesses, as created by the dancers in action.” He wanted to capture the magic of ballet in visual terms, Denby added, to show “the unconscious grace and spontaneous animation that makes a choreography cease to be a lecture and become a dance.”

To take photos of Ballet , Brodovitch hid in the wings during rehearsals and recorded the performances from the wings of the stage. He used a handheld 35mm Contax camera and utilized available light. He pushed the medium, slowing down the shutter speed to blur and capture movement, and lengthening the exposure to achieve greater grain and contrast.

In the darkroom, he blurred and burned to achieve extreme highlights in some areas and deep shadows in others. His intention was to foreground form, blur, contrast, gesture, and movement—the atmosphere of dance—in the photographs. “Photography is not just a pictorial report,” Brodovitch said. “It is also a psychological report.”

Brodovitch divided Ballet into segments, one for each of the eleven dances, which include Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces, George Balanchine's Cotillon , and Leonide Massine's Symphonie Fantastique . The landscape-format book is designed with two photographs on a spread, each page containing a full-bleed image; when the book is opened, the two images create a single panorama. The sections read like a continuous strip of film, in sequences that flow with their own rhythm and cadence.

The photographs simultaneously capture a certain combination of the ephemeral and the carved in stone, a phenomenon that Brodovitch exploits to great cinematic effect with the arrangement of visual elements and design. The book is an intentional challenge to the stillness of photography. As dance is the subject of Ballet , Brodovitch manages to capture movement by pushing the medium to its limits.

“These images totally violated the accepted conventions of good photographic technique, which demanded a sharp representation of the subject and a large, fluid overall scale,” wrote Gerry Badger in The Photobook: A History . “Far from trying to tone down these defects, Brodovitch deliberately exaggerated them.” When Herman Landshoff, who made the final copies of the photographs in the original book, confessed to Brodovitch that he had accidentally dropped a negative and stepped on it, Brodovitch seemed delighted. “Print it as is,” he said. “Things like that are part of the medium.”

When the book was first published in the 1940s, the images seemed cluttered and unresolved compared to standard magazine photography. But Brodovitch's unconventional exploration of the graphic possibilities of photography gave younger photographers permission to innovate; the variations in exposure, movement, and blur became characteristic of the work of Ernst Haas, Leiter, and William Klein in the 1950s and 1960s.

Brodovitch, in collaboration with J.J. Augustin, the editor of the original Ballet , used grained intaglio plates to print the book's photographs, a process that allows for exquisite print quality with deep blacks and velvety gray tones; the ink's viscosity, however, is not stable, making it difficult to maintain consistency throughout a print run. That was Brodovitch's choice, said Nina Holland, who runs Little Steidl, Steidl's boutique imprint specializing in particular printing techniques. Holland, who oversaw the production of the new edition, also edited it with Joshua Chuang, Gagosian's director of photography.

According to Holland, Brodovitch was curious “to master an industrial machine as a direct means of making a work of art.” For the new Ballet , Holland invented a printing process that required scanning the photogravure pages from several copies of the 1945 book—the closest surviving source to the original photographs—and using offset lithography to print the copies.

Brodovitch had an artistic instinct. While in his day job he was a visionary in transforming the pages of a magazine, Ballet was his only attempt to create a work of art that reflected not only his deepest cultural values ​​but also his most authentic sensibilities. “As far as I know, Brodovitch didn’t talk to anyone about how he made the book,” Holland said. “He just handed it out, and with great pride.”

For Brodovitch, the Ballets Russes companies brought back impressions of her childhood in Russia, Denby wrote, “memories of family theatrical feasts and of creatures as bright as butterflies on a magical stage.” Ballet was both a purposeful experiment with photography and design that tapped into the imagination of generations of artists, and a tribute to artistic creation, in this case ballet, so close to Brodovitch’s heart. “She didn’t photograph strangers,” Denby wrote, “she photographed her family; and that’s why her photographs have such an intimate tone.”

Translation: Elisa Carnelli