Jasper Johal
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Ballerina
🕑 Added 2021-09-06 06:00:09 +0000 UTCAs society was being transformed by industrialization in the 1800s, dance became a dominant form of mainstream entertainment. No longer reserved for just the aristocracy, dancers started performing at cafes, bars and local theaters.
Other artists, hanging out at these urban watering holes, were entranced by dancers as subjects for their own art. Painters like Edgar Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec found them a rich source of inspiration.
As a teenage immigrant I scraped a living washing dishes in restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area. Many of the waitresses I worked with were dancers. After getting off work, late in the evening, we would all pile into a car and head off to party and drink for the rest of the night at various dance venues around the Bay area.
My earliest photography subjects were these dancers I hung out with. A dancer friend recommended me to a leg-warmer company that was looking for a photographer to shoot an advertising postcard for them. That shoot became my first commercial photography job. As I gradually transitioned from washing dishes to doing photography for a living, dance remained a big part of my life.
PHOTO: Erin is a ballerina and Pilates instructor in the Los Angeles area. She came to me to do some marketing photos. But seeing the Body as Temple prints hanging on my studio walls, she decided to come back for a second session to do some art nudes. She said she wanted a record of what her body looks like so one day she could show her future granddaughters how cool their grandma was.
