Jerry Metellus - a Dancer's Photographer
In a performance, a dancer's leaps, extensions and lines are gone in the blink of an eye. That's where Jerry Metellus comes in. A professional photographer with a dance background, he captures that blink and frames it for posterity.
Jerry's interest started early. He said, "I remember I was four years old. I had to have a camera. It was this obsession. By five I had a camera and I tore it up. They gave it to me, I opened up the back and took the film out. I still remember the smell of that film."
By the time he hit Tokyo as a model and then Paris as a dancer, he was photographing fellow performers and when his travels brought him to Las Vegas, the quality was professional. "I got here at a time when people were taking photographs of models, in the mid to late 80's, with their hands on their hips laying down, still with their Farrah Fawcett hair. In Europe, they'd been done with that forever."
A chance contact led Jerry to Cirque du Soleil and they liked what they saw, mainly because Jerry understood the peaks in dance. He said, "...it requires understanding movement; it requires understanding the timing because what happens when you take a picture, an action shot, by the time you see it, that split fraction of a second of delayed reaction between your eye and the trigger and click is gone. Serious. The person landed. By the time you take it, you have this person with one foot down, looking like a crow, because you have to anticipate."
"A show has so many different levels, it is impossible to shoot the whole thing in one shot. Because if you're seeing the Cirque du Soleil shows, for example, something's going on on the wall, something's going on on the ceiling, something's going on onstage. How do you capture all that? So then you have to make a decision. Tonight I'm going to focus on this. The next time I'll focus on that. For that specific number, you may have to come three or four times to get exactly the shots you wanted."
Better yet, bring the company in during the day and pick and choose the shots. "The advantage you have then is to get with the choreographer and you can say, 'Remember there was a moment here.' 'OK, let's go back to this, this, this and that. Ok that moment. Just from the top. Six, seven, eight.' So they're not doing the whole routine. The other way to work when you're working with a company or a show, is if they can provide you with a tape, then you set your markers."
Once he has an idea of what he's shooting, he turns to the lighting. "The key thing about photography is understanding lighting, how to select what's already there or modify it or point blank create it. Dancing, the movement is key, but you can't capture movement without light so it goes hand in hand." And if he's shooting on the show's stage, he tries not to change anything. "The whole idea is to try to be true to what's going on. There's a reason why the dancers are lit right from above. There's a reason they're lit from the side. Who am I to come and change that around. So my job is to document what's going on."
What's going on is very different for each subject and Jerry makes it his business to know each one's "signature." He said, "Martha Graham - big, fluid, big circles; Twyla Tharp's a whole different thing; Momix - is acrobatics and energetic. They throw each other around. They wrap each other around. You say, 'Is this dance? Am I doing acrobatics or dance?' You have to understand that. So therefore, if I do a whole series of photographs of Momix but I shoot it with big circles, that's not their signature. I missed the mark. It may be pretty but it's not their signature so I missed the mark. I picked the wrong movements to illustrate that style."
The same way he picks signature movements for show shots, he picks an individual's strengths for studio shots. He said, "Then I ask the person, 'Ok, what are you good at? Are you powerful?' 'Oh, my thing's extension. I'm not strong. I have good jumps.' 'Ok. We'll photograph extension.'"
Jerry Metellus can make a dancer look spectacular, but it's a collaborative effort and the dancer must trust him to know when the movement is perfect for the shot. That often means the ego gets parked outside the door. He said, "The least pompous ego attitude you bring to a set, the lighter you fly." And the result is sheer perfection, snapped at its peak.
To check out his work, go to www.jerrymetellus.com.