Last fall, Elizaveta Porodina, a visual artist known for her experimental fashion and fine art photography, conducted a marathon, two-day photoshoot with 10 New York City Ballet dancers. Using vibrant colors and with choreography overseen by NYCB Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan and NYCB Repertory Director Craig Hall, Porodina created dynamic images of thrilling movement, which captured the performers’ moods and emotions in the moment. “My forte lies in the authentic live reaction,” she explained from Munich, where she’s based. “I try to create something new on the set with the people present.”
The something new in this instance is a boundary-pushing re-imagining of traditional ballet imagery, in pictures more akin to painting than conventional photography, another Porodina forte. Her singular body of work, often displaying elements of surrealism, symbolic narrative, and ambiguity, has landed exhibitions at Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Münchner Stadtmuseum, and Fotografiska museums in Berlin, New York, Shanghai, and Stockholm. She has also lensed high-profile projects for fashion houses like Armani, Chanel, Dior, and Carolina Herrera, and publications like Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ, among many others on an international scale.
This Winter Season, Porodina’s arresting photographs of NYCB dancers are on view at the David H. Koch Theater in the 12th installment of the Company’s Art Series, featuring site-specific work by contemporary artists. (NYCB aficionados received a preview as part of the Company’s 2024-25 season campaign, Ballet Unbound; the exhibition includes never-before-seen images.)
Porodina attributes the remarkable look of her pictures to having never studied photography formally. Growing up in an arts-loving family in Moscow, Russia, in the 1990s, she recalls going to art galleries, poring over art books with her mother, and being obsessed with painting and drawing. “From the time I was a young child, art made it possible for me to express my emotions and thoughts more easily than with sentences,” she says.
When she was 12, her family, who is Jewish, no longer felt comfortable in Russia and emigrated to Germany. Feeling obliged to pursue a “serious profession” when the time came, Porodina became a clinical psychologist, drawn by her interest in the complexities of the subconscious. But after two years, she made the decision to give herself one year to see if she could forge a path as a full-time artist. She never looked back.
Porodina had discovered photography, a visual medium that offered her a boundless mode of expression and, unlike painting, provided a social component missing from her solitary days at the easel. “With photography, I realized I could challenge new sides of myself every day, and meet and work with all sorts of people,” she says. She also relished the adrenaline rush a photo shoot affords. “You don’t get that at home with your brushes—at least I don’t,” she jokes.
Yet the paintings of artists ranging from Cezanne and Picasso to Rodchenko, Max Ernst, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and many more have remained a primary influence on Porodina’s art, one that enriches her pictures with layers of meaning. “When I’m seeking out scenarios for my work, I might think about the skin of the people in Edvard Munch’s pictures or the emotion in the lights on the skirts in Edgar Degas’ paintings,” she says.
Her background in clinical psychology also informs her work, allowing her to use photography as a way to explore the subconscious mind.
For the NYCB shoot, Porodina collaborated with designer Mati Hays of House of Iconica who created costumes designed to show off movement. Make-up artist Susie Sobol and hair stylist Evanie Frausto were deployed to fashion make-up and hair that played with variations in shadow and light. Josef Beyer contributed the lighting concept, creating the scenic basis for Porodina to explore with the artists. Placing the dancers outside the context of familiar NYCB ballets allowed Porodina to create a wholly original environment: “I wanted only the dancers, the emotion, and the inner-workings of the movement to become visible,” she says.
Visit NYCBallet.com.
