MH photographer, part of United Nations traveling art exhibit,
combines the fragility of ballerinas with the starkness of
geology
A ballerina in a stream, her body folded like the curves of the
canyon through which it cuts. Another in the arabesque on a
sandstone rock, stark in her red tutu against a cobalt sky.
MH photographer, part of United Nations traveling art exhibit, combines the fragility of ballerinas with the starkness of geology
A ballerina in a stream, her body folded like the curves of the canyon through which it cuts. Another in the arabesque on a sandstone rock, stark in her red tutu against a cobalt sky.
Narinder Dogra has found the place where art meets nature, where the soft, sculpted moves of dance form a contrast to the unmoving forces of nature.
Dogra, of Morgan Hill, isn’t a geologist or a dancer, but a photographer who has taken elements from each of the disciplines to create, if not an art form, a new way of contemplating nature and esthetics.
Dogra calls his exercises dancescapes, probably the most striking example of which captures a solitary ballerina at rest on the tiers of an empty amphitheater at Canyon de Chelly that’s been carved into Arizona desert sandstone by millennia of pounding from wind and rain. Other dramatic backdrops are Zion and Bryce canyons and Arches National Park in Utah and the Grand Canyon.
“I view Earth as a wise, aged, slow-motion dancer. She twirls, drifts, wobbles on her axis, heaves up and down, ebbs and flows, circling all in her eternal dance. To me, rhythm and flow resonate both in the choreographic lines of the ballerina and the earth’s layers of sedimentary deposits,” Dogra said.
His web site, www.dancescape.net, divides his work by earthly category: field, rock, sky, water, sand.
Dogra also has photographed dancers at Death Valley, Yosemite, Mammoth Lake and Pismo Beach, juxtapositioning the eternal and the ephemeral, the durable and the fragile, the stationary and the rhythmic.
The photo of the ballerina, shot in the Arizona wastelands near the Utah border, has circled the globe as part of a United Nations traveling exhibit. It was one of 106 pieces chosen from among 43,000 entries. It’s on exhibit at Morgan Hill’s new community center through the end of the month as part of the inaugural decor.
Dogra, 61, was reared in Nangal, a village of six houses in the northern Kashmir region of India. He is actually a recreational photographer since he earns a living as an electrical engineer.
As a child, Dogra’s only entertainment consisted of movies and grainy newsreels. But one day at age eight or nine he caught a newsreel featuring a Russian ballerina that left him transfixed.
“I was totally captivated by her performance. I thought that she must not have any bones,” Dogra said.
As an adolescent and later, as he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering at Banares Hindu University and the University of Sidney in Australia, Dogra attended dance performances as frequently as possible.
“I have absorbed some formal knowledge of dance by osmosis, but mostly my appreciation of dance is as an art. I know what an arabesque, an attitude or a split is,” Dogra said.
“By the time I left Australia for the United States,” Dogra added, “my mind had begun connecting the unnatural — the studied human endeavors of art, music, dance and, for that matter engineering — with the natural, which is to say animals and the outdoors.”
Arriving in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, Dogra was thrilled to be so close to the San Francisco Ballet, the oldest such company in the country, as well as the wilds of the Sierra Nevada and the coastal range. As a lifelong lover of nature, he had spent much time hiking in the Australian outback.
In the U.S., professional and social contacts led him to Sheri Parks, who became his first ballerina model at a photo shoot on a San Francisco beach in 1983.
The dancescape was born.
Much of Dogra’s photography is done in the Southwest, where he finds an abundance of natural settings.
“The majesty and monumentality of this American wilderness accentuates the ballerina’s fragility and fleeting beauty,” Dogra said.
The sandstone amphitheater where he photographed the ballerina was discovered by accident as he was searching for another shooting venue.
Photography in the desert isn’t always easy, Dogra said, recalling encounters with rattlesnakes and scorpions as well as incidents of stalled vehicles and misplaced car keys.
As a mode of expression, Dancescapes isn’t new, Dogra said.
“It’s been done before. But no one else has used such an expansive setting as I do. Also, I have access to locations and dancers that other photographers often don’t,” Dogra said.
Dogra uses no more than two rolls of 36 exposures each during a day of photography. He shoots exclusively with single-lens reflex cameras, the Nikon FM2 and FA.
“It’s a slow procedure. I need the right background and the right lighting. Then, the dancers have to come up with the poses they want,” Dogra said.
In a sense, the dancer controls the shoot and the outcome.
“They demand to see all the proofs before I print and they have the final say in selecting what I use. Sometimes they’ll like perhaps only three of 72 shots. Dancers are very particular because certain (bad) poses can ruin a career,” Dogra said.
A long-term project, a book titled Dancescapes that contains the best of his work, is on hold, rejected 11 times by the same number of publishers, Dogra said.
He is considering self-publishing, but is waiting to see if the economy turns around.
The book project was delayed also when his Morgan Hill home flooded twice the past eight years. Also, he took time out to marry a long-time friend from India. Athough the wedding took place in January 2001, Deepa’s arrival in Morgan Hill was delayed until September passed by the wait for a visa.
