Photographer Haley Jane Samuelson is raising funds through Kickstarter for her new project The Indecisive Moment: Fine Art Portraits of NYC Dancers. A fund raising goal is established and donors receive incentives at various dollar amounts. If the goal is not met during a specific time frame the project is canceled and no funds are collected.
Dancers have long served as muses and models for artists of all different visual mediums. As in Degas’s ballerina studies, or Picasso’s imaginative lithograph, Le Ballet, they act as brokers between the abstract nature of human spirituality and the tangibility of the physical world. But what image of humanity do these works reflect? What questions of human identity and crisis do they reveal? Are they simply about beauty, or do the bodies of the dancers provide symbolic material for the ethical, political, and aesthetic questions raised by man’s own image of himself? The exploration of the boundary between artist and muse — in myths and sagas, in the earliest records of ritual and art — is part of the great ongoing debate about creation itself.
As an investigation of the relationship between artist and muse, I have began to photograph traditional and contemporary dancers from the major New York Dance Companies, including The New York Ballet, Martha Graham and Paul Taylor Company, among others. The work is a result of a unique collaboration between the dancers and myself. While the project has had a successful start, I am having to cut corners and make compromises due to lack of funds. The money I raise will go to: equipment rental, photo assistant fees, test prints, transportation to and from location to location, data storage (massive files require lots of hard drives and back ups), and stylist/prop costs.
Please check out my website to view my completed works: www.haleyjsamuelson.com
You will also find out information regarding previous exhibitions, press and publications.
To see my work in progress please check out my facebook page: www.facebook.com/haleyjs
The work will be under the photo section in an album titled Work in Progress
Kickstarter link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/510514608/the-indecisive-moment-fine-art-portraits-of-nyc-da
