A collaborative photographic series
BROKEN
ROCKS
Body, stone and the space betweenGundolf PfotenhauerA body enters the break.
BROKEN ROCKS was made in the Napa Valley, California, in collaboration with Eleanor Coppola and dancers from ODC/Dance Company.
We worked among large rocks that had split apart over time. I asked a nude dancer to move into the openings: to bend, stretch and press her body into the space between the broken forms.
For a moment, the gap is filled.
The dancer does not stand apart from the landscape. Her skin meets the rough surface of the stone, and the curve of her body follows the shape of the fracture. What looks hard and permanent is set against something living, vulnerable and in motion.
In some photographs the body seems to complete the rock. In others it appears caught, protected or held inside it. The images move between closeness and tension, as if the body and the stone are trying to remember that they once belonged together.
BROKEN ROCKS is about separation and connection.
The break remains, but for one brief moment a human body fills the space and makes the broken form whole.