image composer
Anja Hitzenberger and dancers create urban figure-scapes.
Photographer Anja Hitzenberger has been collaborating with choreographers for a decade in a long-term project she calls Body in Space. About composing her outdoor, urban figure-scapes, she says, “The space around the body is just as important as the figure.” Hitzenberger often leaves out the head because it can be distracting.
A choreographer arranges bodies in space, creating plastique, the tableau we see at a given moment on the concert dance stage. Hitzenberger crisply accentuates lines, shapes, and colors on the photo’s two-dimensional plane. She calls herself an image composer.
Hitzenberger meets the dancer halfway, someplace defined by the image of the dancer’s body in space.
Hitzenberger meets the dancer halfway, someplace defined by the image of the dancer’s body in space.She brought Jimena Paz to a location in Red Hook with a series of ten doors. There she asked Paz to move differently in each. Hitzenberger framed the performance scenes in her lens. Paz's colorful costume accentuates her movement.
Judith Sanchez, a former Trisha Brown dancer, can personify states of alertness, anticipation, and relaxation. Hitzenberger photographed her in a quiet dock in Tribeca, capturing her kinesthetic sense in crisp images. Neutral colors in the décor accentuate Sanchez’s exteriorized energy.
Hitzenberger likes the mix of different body types. She and choreographer Thom Fogarty recently documented his weight loss project in a theatrical photograph. Jennifer Dunning, writing about this downtown dancer in 1989, called him “utterly at home in all his roles.”
In a 2007 project, Hitzenberger turned an abandoned downtown storefront into the weeklong "Changing Room." Sanchez, Alexandra Beller, Kathy Westwater, Deborah Lohse and others soloed on consecutive evenings while Hitzenberger photographed them. The temporary site was alive with dance. Passers-by peeped at a scintillating storefront display of Lohse in a classical tutu. The resulting photographs celebrate performance, including the shoot.
Yves Musard is the pioneer of dance in outdoor urban spaces. When Hitzenberger photographed him in the industrial Con Edison grounds East of Fourteenth Street, she understood that he was dancing with the lines of the building. The images are pre- 911, when the area was open and accessible. Hitzenberger’s work with Musard sparked her Body in Space project.
Hitzenberger took the Musard photos with a toy ‘Holga’ camera. Now she is digital and exploiting the color and texture possibilities of the medium. Her images contrast neutral, timeworn qualities, hard lines in the architecture with high key colors and malleable properties in décor or costumes, and the slumped or uplifted life in the body.
In her site-specific, performance collaborations, composition makes the lasting objet de art.
See Hitzenberger portfolios on her web site, Corpus, and 180 Magazine. She teaches “The Body in Space” at the International Center for Photography in spring.
