White room

I wanted to make the opposite of a night shot: a room where everything is white. White curtains, a white floor, a white tulle dress, and soft daylight coming through all of it. It's the kind of image that's easy to make and hard to make interesting.

The risk with white on white is that the dancer disappears. Soft light leaves almost no shadow to separate her from the room, so something else has to: her dark hair, the freckles in the close-ups, the satin of her pointe shoes.

What I wanted to try

Moving the camera through the room, not around it. The curtains hang in layers, so the camera passes through them. A frame goes completely white with fabric, then opens onto her. Her hair does the same once, sweeping across the lens. Some of the cuts happen inside the fabric, so you don't feel them as cuts.

And dance, but in pieces. Pointe shoes on the floor, a hand reaching through a curtain, a spin with the skirt flaring out, then her face so close you can count the freckles. She ends lying back in a pile of tulle with her eyes closed, as if the room caught her.

When everything is white, texture is the only contrast you have.

What I took from it

Texture carries a white frame. Tulle, sheer curtain, skin and satin are all white or close to it, but each one catches the light differently, and that difference is the whole image. Lose the texture and a white shot looks like an overexposed photo.

And a white room needs close-ups. From far away she's a shape in the fabric. Up close she has freckles, a strand of hair across her face, lips that aren't quite closed. That's where she becomes a person, and the wide shots borrow it from there.