Monday’s Muse: Babette Mangolte

Dancers are unique creatures. They express themselves through emphasised gestural movements and body language with extensive physical attributes. They are an exaggerated physical representation of everything they have experienced; lived, loved, seen and hurt, and they bare it all, knocking it out of themselves in front of whom ever might care to watch.

French-American cinematographer and film director Babette Mangolte is best known for her spirited photographic archive which documents experimental theater, dance and the performance scene of the 1970s and ’80s. I’ve been wandering through a range of her dance-focused images over the past week and have become a smidgen obsessed. They’re beautifully quiet, polite enough to see even the subtlest of movements and open enough to celebrate their honesty. I would love to print a selection of these as large as I could afford and slap them all over my walls. I think I’d enjoy the daily reminder to respond intuitively, much like a dancer would.

I though this quote summed that idea up quite well; Mangolte credits Dziga Vertov’s ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929) as the film that made her decide to become a cinematographer:

“Seeing the film several times between 1961 and 1964 led me to apply to film school, giving up on the predictability of an academic life in mathematics for a life of uncertainty and adventure. In the 1960s, women and film cameras just didn’t mix and I was warned against pursuing my dream. But Utopia and joie de vivre were at the core of Man with a Movie Camera and I was unafraid.”

{Image above by Babette Mangolte featuring Sylvia Palacios Whitman in ‘Passing Through’ performance at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1977.}