I / Prologue
So it’s midday in mid-October and I’m working on some writing for a client, but I am also momentarily on Facebook, and my eyes take in an ad for a photography competition aimed at women. Last call, it says—the deadline is that day. I’d never heard of PhMuseum, I’m wary of brand names that refuse to be pronounced, and I don’t make a habit of shelling out for lottery tickets, say, but something about this unexpected opportunity winds up irresistible (and I swear it’s not just the dazzling way it has distracted me from my work).
So at first I’m just clicking at favorite photos, dreaming up an angle, but soon I’m flooded with the words, I have the title phrase, I feel the exact mood I want those requisite twenty-photos-max to convey. By the time I’ve paid the contest fee I have the sense that what I just wrote alone is worth an investment of thirty-some euro several times over. My entry has revealed itself to be the answer to a question at the center of my life, but it’s one I hadn’t squarely asked before this day. And this word I’ve made mine—adance—it’s, well, electrifying. No matter what happens on that judging panel, I’ve already won.
II / PhMuseum Women Photographers 2023 Grant Submission—“Bodies Adance” by Natalia Osiatynska
/intro/ The body adance is alight with its own urge to create, to express, and to grow. My portraits of people finding embodiment through dance may be stills, but they capture physical and mental movement, internal and external transformation.
/statement/ Embodiment is a way of life, not a waypoint. Countless practices can be of use, but dance helps most thrillingly. The body adance is a body alight with its own higher-order urge to create, to express, to grow. And the journey the mind takes from head to body is one measured in units of astonishment and liberation.
It turns out that unlearning one’s automatic patterns of movement is not a matter of resistance but one of abundance. Turning inward, it turns out, enables connection. Whether friends or strangers, those who are collectively exploring their somatic potential through dance inflect one another with flashes of freedom, glints of strength, reveries of release.
I never planned on taking deliberate steps to awakening my body. My mind seemed determined enough. But ideas would catch in my throat, physical discomfort would trap my attention. Voice lessons revealed that how I sound when I speak is less about having something to say and more about how I stand, how I breathe, how I imagine myself in motion. Bodywork followed, then postural techniques, then meditation. Eventually I hit bedrock with dance: in contact improvisation my body found its language.
When I reach for the camera to take pictures of people adance, I feel as though I am dancing, too. Moved by life itself to grasp and express the essential, the profound, the universal, I see past what is visible and into inner worlds, inner lives. The images may be stills, but they are accounts of physical and mental movement, of internal and external transformation. Over and over, they are also revealed to be valuable sources of information for those in the photographs.
I look forward to continuing this work and to honing ways of using images and words to support others on their dance-based somatic journeys.
/credits/ All photos taken by Natalia Osiatynska in 2023 with Fujinon primes on a Fujifilm body at various contact improv events in Warsaw, Poland. Submitted with permission from all persons involved.
III / Epilogue
Almost a month from the date of my submission a message arrives from a named sender who hopes his email finds me well. I read that I haven’t been selected for a prize or for an honorable mention. This of course is not good news, but remarkably it isn’t bad news either. It is neutral news. Some part of me has already gotten my due from all this bother. Some part persists in celebrating on.
IV / Appendix
Days after I submit my entry, weeks before I will know the results, I tell a friend about the contest. She’s intrigued and she wants a peek, but she’s afraid her English isn’t up to the task. So I adapt my statement into Polish, but then the friend never gets around to having a look. I, however, now have a Polish version I can post on my website. Here it is.