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A MOMENT ONSTAGE

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YSIDRA P.

What if a wedding were a ballet?

Viewed together, these photographs unfold like a ballet performance. 

The woman to our left appears poised in the stage wings, her back strong yet expressive, holding the quiet composure of a dancer settling into character. That held stillness then gives way to motion—a body enters the space, spinning with abandon as momentum builds. 






In the final image, that energy releases fully, bursting outward in a leap that ignites the room like fireworks.

This progression, from pause to movement to release, links these three photographs taken at different weddings into a story of a ballerina transitioning from pause to flight.

This creation of chronology from seemingly disconnected moments calls to mind Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet (1945) series. Captured across various Ballets Russes companies, Brodovitch’s photographs coalesce into a single choreography, with dancers from different productions seeming to replace one another midair.

Like Holger’s wedding photographs, Brodovitch’s work is experienced not as a sequence of images but as a performance, favoring swirls of motion and exhaled pauses over the specifics of time and place.
 Though they photograph different subjects across distinct eras, both Holger and Brodovitch trace an invisible choreography of stillness and energy, staging a delicate exchange between pause and release. Whether turning their lenses toward weddings or ballet, each artist draws seemingly disparate worlds into a shared rhythmic logic.

As I look at these works, I am reminded of my time as a ballerina and of moments spent at weddings. The longer I linger on these images, the more my sense of linear time fades, replaced by the feeling of a performance always about to begin.
© Holger Thoss, Top