Time Lapsed Dancers – BODIES IN MOVEMENT: ‘NUDE’ BY SHINICHI MARUYAMA

You can touch movement. Like it was a creamy sustance, or an elaborate plaster sculpture. At least that’s how it would seem by observing the dancers photographed in series “Nude” by Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama, in collaboration with choreographer Jessica Lang.

Behind every image is the perfection of a human body that is liquefied in time and movement, decomposing into millionths of a second to then recompose into a compact three-dimensional sequence.

Maruyama was introduced to photographer by a teacher at his elementary school and experimented for years the portrayal of movement, especially in water, as we described in this previous article.

With “Nude”, he takes the study of the subject to a further stage, trying to refine it in relation to the unraveling of time that thus becomes the “painter of photography”.

In this series he in fact uses much more elaborate techniques than in his previous works. For “Nude”, each image is the digital synthesis of 10 thousand unique shots that compose the bodies of the dancers.

A century ago, scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey inspired many artists through his photo camera with which he was able to take 12 shots a second. But with the current technology, Maruyama managed to capture 2 thousand photos a second and blend them into a kinetic cream through the use of new tools.