World Press Photo Gallery

by 2007 prizewinners

As a sponsor of the World Press Photo 07 exhibition in Toronto, The Walrus is pleased to present a critical analysis of a selection of the images.

Photographer: Denis Darzacq, France, Agence Vu

Description : Paris street dancers display their skills at breakdancing, capoeira and other personalized dance forms. Breakdance evolved as part of the hip hop movement among African American youths in New York City in the 1970s, and is arguably the best known of hip hop dance styles. Capoeira is derived from a Brazilian martial art. Although dances may involve a known range of positions or steps, they are unstructured, highly improvisational expressions of individual technique.

Comment from Alison Nordström, Ph.D, curator:

Denis Darzacq's 'Street Dancers, Paris' is an arresting, unsettling and bizarre image, but above all it is a manifestation of the slipperiness of the photograph. Sliced out of its time space continuum, or presented without a caption, this picture would not be read as that of a dancer. Even if one has a passing acquaintance with breakdancing, capoeira and parkour, those transgressive physical arts are not the first things this photograph calls to mind. The black clad figure improbably horizontalized against a grimy urban white wall seems more like the figure of death from The Seventh Seal, a flying hooded superhero, the already dead victim of a terrorist street bombing, or a falling suicide seconds before terrible impact.

The freezing of gesture that the camera makes possible creates the ambiguity that challenges the knowledge permitted by our slower eyes. Leaping or falling, flying or dancing, willed or inadvertent, dead or living, joyous or brutally sad, this graphic image is the blank canvas on which we paint our hopes and fears.


--Alison Nordström, Ph.D is curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

Further reading in The Walrus:
- "Moving for Mitt" (September 2007) by Mona Awad
- "Walking Off the Map" (May 2006) by John Bentley Mays

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