When it came to documenting the collaboration between the New York City Ballet and certain high-profile heritage fashion houses, award-winning photographer Pari Dukovic had to balance several contrasting forces: the stillness of portraiture and the dynamism of dancers… the individuality of each designer and the cohesive narrative of an institution like the NYCB… the flat two-dimensionality of a photograph and the immersive tridimensional nature of ballet. On top of it all, the 130 looks pulled by director of costumes Marc Happel had to be shot in a span of just six days. “This was probably my most challenging shoot, in many ways,” Dukovic told Observer.
The resultant photographs were the subject of the 2023 Rizzoli book New York City Ballet: Choreography & Couture and are now being exhibited at VISU Contemporary in Miami in the first stop on what Dukovic envisions as a multi-venue tour. The exhibition features twenty-five prints showcasing nearly thirty couture costumes created for the NYCB’s annual Fall Fashion Gala, first conceived of by Sarah Jessica Parker in 2012. Among them are striking prints of the Company’s dancers wearing Sarah Burton, Thom Browne, Prabal Gurung, Carolina Herrera and the late Virgil Abloh, among others—it’s rare to see dance and fashion and art as masterfully melded as they are here.
Dukovic, in the 2010s, was a staff photographer at the New Yorker and shot the likes of Barack Obama, Gayle King, Taylor Swift and Nancy Pelosi. He started working for the NYCB in 2019, shooting the annual marketing campaigns that promote each year’s program, and was soon tapped to photograph the regular artistic partnerships between the Company and top fashion designers. (Valentino Garavani designed the first Fall Fashion Gala costumes for then-company director Peter Martins, who choreographed four ballets for the inaugural event around the designer’s concepts.) Dukovic was scheduled to start shooting in 2020. “Of course, that didn’t happen,” he said. “On the flip side, it provided me with the time to focus on tailoring a creative direction for the book.”
The two-year hiatus between the project kickoff date and the actual photoshoots, which happened in 2022, gave him time to unleash his inner nerd. “I had an Excel sheet with a picture of each dancer and a picture of each costume, and I had a grid of this dancer with this costume or these three dancers with this costume collection,” he explained. His copious notes include background colors along with the potential perspective and angle for each shot.
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His fascination with art history, which informs his practice, proved to be the winning element. “I’m originally from Istanbul, and I double-majored in photography and art history,” he said. “Being born and raised there, you’re kind of surrounded by art history. For the Company, I was thinking, how do I bring dancers together to be able to almost pay homage to that? You know, in my own way, through my own visual vocabulary.”
The sleek, geometric Rosie Assoulin costumes that reference suiting, created in 2016 for the ballet Unframed, reminded him of Picasso’s line drawings. With Olivier Theyskens’ costumes for the 2013 production of The Crucible, with their loose, weightless fabric, Dukovic wanted to channel the Nike of Samothrakia. For Humberto Leon’s costumes for New Blood, a series of destructured unitards that drew inspiration from Jane Fonda’s aerobics, he staged an ensemble shot that recreated the structure of Matisse’s La Danse.
Dukovic speaks highly of the collaborative process and those who participated in it—particularly of the dancers who showed up for six ten-hour days. “The beauty of working with a dancer is you give them a note, and they know exactly how to execute it—the timing of it is phenomenal,” he said. But they also were forthright about calibrating Dukovic’s expectations. “You know, because I’m not a ballet dancer, they were able to guide me.” In one instance, it turned out a costume designed by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen that combined an ornate bodice with a full, multi-layered skirt that only looked weightless. The dancer helped Dukovic, who thought the costume would be lighter, get the shot he’d envisioned.
The VISU Contemporary show marks the first time Dukovic’s photos are being shown outside the book and the first time they’ve been enlarged—some to near life-size. “It’s my first time getting to see these photographs printed on a large scale,” the photographer said with excitement in his voice.
“En Pointe: Dance & Fashion” is on view at Miami’s VISU Contemporary through November 16. From there, the exhibition will travel to several additional venues yet to be announced.
