photo special, light dance

light dance, a story in images, by Charlie Alice Raya

Light dance

photo special

It all started with a short holiday in a pirate camp in Poland, near the island Usedom. We were sitting around a campfire, and I was playing with the camera, moving it so that the flames would show as golden streaks on the image. I was fascinated and soon went looking for a new source of light to make more experiments, and found some fairy lights not far from the campfire.

Once I was back in Berlin, I couldn’t get the fairy lights out of my mind, and some months later, I bought a set of fairy lights, red, blue, green.

And then came a night in March: camera on a tripod, the red fairy lights ready on the floor, the stereo blasting Swan Lake, and me dancing with the fairy lights while operating the camera via remote control.

It took another three months, before I set up everything again, this time with all three colours.

It was a lot of fun. And the images have a great dynamic, revealing what the eye can’t see.

What I didn’t see back then was that there was also a story hidden in the images. I found it while looking for additional material for the Hub photo special. It was one of those moments when you go looking for one thing, and you come back with something utterly unexpected.