The latest exhibit at The Project Space in NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arts Center is titled Grace: A Retrospective of Dance Portraiture and Performance 1986-2004. The exhibit traces NYUAD Arts Professor of Film and New Media Joanne Savio’s career as a dance photographer and captures the relationship between the dancers and the photographer.

####So, Grace comes about as a memoir of sorts that is a collection of your work as a photographer. Could you tell us more about the process and what it looked like?

Really it’s only a retrospective of my dance portraiture and performance work for a certain period of time. … I would go down into the basement the last two summers, sit there on the world’s smallest light table using the world’s oldest magnifying glass and look through maybe 2000 dance negatives to try and identify work that would be representative.

When I was doing that, there were tears shed, there was laughter because many of my subjects have passed on, they’re no longer with us. I realised it wasn’t only pulling work for a retrospective, or like my colleague Awam Ampka, says “an introspective not a retrospective.” It was also looking at my life.

Some of the images on exhibit right now were done as a project for The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Those dancers I shot in 6 different countries,I don’t know if I’ll ever meet them again. It was a one-time shoot. Other dancers like Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris — I’ve had the opportunity of developing a relationship with them. Mark Morris and Bill T. Jones were part of my book Vital Grace … Like Trisha, they were two artists that I photographed numerous times over a period of years, and that relationship starts to change and we become real collaborators and friends.

Photograph courtesy of Joanne Savio

####Who is the black male dancer? What did he represent in the late 90s and your previous projects and what does he represent now?

Courageous men. Because for a black man to enter the world of dance takes an incredible amount of courage. A lot of times families are against it — families don’t understand that career decision and also in the life of a dancer, to actually perform isn’t forever. So many of these wonderful dancers that are in my book eventually ended up doing workshops or teaching … In my culture, they are not celebrated as our football stars or basketball stars. They are not paid or anything like that. It is really a passion within them that they almost can’t live without.

Jim [Savio], Lecturer in the Writing Program, and I were at a performance in The Brooklyn Academy of Music and I had a job that I had to cast an African-American male for the book cover. And I saw these two beautiful young men sitting in the audience and I was staring ... So, it was before the performance, and I got up and I said, “Joanne Savio, I’m a photographer. Would you come to a casting?”

I gave them my studio address, and as it turns out, someone else was chosen for the cover but I was talking to one of the men – Duane Cyrus who was the principal dancer with Alvin Ailey. He said, “Would you ever think about doing a book together about the black male dancer?”

And I said, “Ah, that’s an interesting idea!”

So that’s how that project was born, really out of staring … I have never in my life been in the company of such humility, among these men who are all doing this for free.

These men … it was like having them repeat jumps for me, repeat movements for me. And they were in awe because I was so amazed at what they did, because to them, it’s what they do. The stories that would come out between the dancers were just amazing … And, I feel like now more than ever with the politics in my country that I do not understand, celebrating African-American life is as important as ever. To me, these men were heroes and they remain heroes. Any images of them I end up selling, a percentage of that goes back to them. They all got prints, they could all use any of the images I shot for their own purposes because I wanted to also give something back.

Photograph courtesy of Joanne Savio

####This highlights not only the humility of these men, but also their vulnerability. Because a lot of people forget that it is important to be vulnerable when you’re faced by a camera.

It is. I think when a camera is faced at them, it has made some very famous people feel vulnerable. Including people like Philip Glass or Norah Jones or many of the people I have photographed, because the photographer has a certain power to manipulate. Depending on the level of my camera to you, if I was down looking up at you, how powerful you’d be. If I was high looking down on you, you would appear more vulnerable. How I light you, what the environment is, all those are choices that I make that will eventually create an image that the viewer might believe is truth. And really, it is my idea of what truth is.

####Right. And your work with Norah Jones, for instance, was the first ever project that she embarked on. The idea of your truth is fascinating, and it links to the idea that the way we see ourselves can never be the way we are captured by a camera. Is it more important to consider how your subject sees themselves, or work with your image of them?

I try to do as much research as I can because I want them to know that I am not only interested in what they’ve done to make them famous but I’m interested in where they were born, their childhood, what their upbringing was like, what their jobs or positions in life were before they got to this level. All of it is a base on trying to win the respect and the trust of your subject. With Norah, she was very suspect. She didn’t want hair and makeup, she brought her own clothes … And I kept showing her Polaroids to let her know that I want her to feel comfortable with what I was seeing.

We can’t pretend to capture the truth. All we can do is take the memory of that moment in particular and be present with that moment. That is what we are presenting to the world. One portrait cannot represent all of what my subject is, it is the truth I saw and captured. It is just that moment in time.

Photograph courtesy of Joanne Savio

####If you were to leave your audience here that is receiving your work, including the students and the broader NYUAD community with one message about your work, what would it be?

It would be to remind all of us to be humble, to not feel a sense of entitlement, to stay curious. To slow your world down, so we don’t miss these little tiny moments where secrets can lie. There is a lot of over-achievers here and I worry sometimes about my students that feel pressured to have to achieve … Sometimes just be with the moment, don’t feel like you have to capture every single thing that you’re doing.