Key Pages
- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The cameraa philanthropy event in which the participants pledge to party for 24 hours in the name of a cause. Two hundred fifty student participants will stay awake and on their feet for twenty-four hours in an effort to symbolize both the mental and physical challenges faced by children suffering from AIDS. At the event, there will a variety of activities and student performances to keep dancers entertained and inspired for all 24 hours. This is Stanford's second Dance Marathon - proceeds will benefit the Elizabeth Glaser AIDS Pediatric Foundation.
Dancers pledged to raise at least $200 dollars to participate; the event as a whole raised more than $52,000 for the Foundation. It spanned from noon Saturday, February 18th to noon Sunday, February 19th. I was participating for the second year, this time as a committee member as well as a dancer.
The camera I used was a Canon S500, with five megapixel resolution and a memory card capacity of about four hundred photos. I was wary of bringing a fancier digital camera because of the nature of the event itself: I was going to be there dancing for twenty-four hours, and I didn’t want something delicate that could be broken or stolen. I was tearing through batteries over the course of twenty-four hours of photographing, and I had two rechargeable batteries for my own camera that I could rotate through. I also brought a Nikon Coolpix, but the quality of the photographs wasn’t really higher than my own digital camera and batteries were an issue. In addition, it changed the way I engaged with people: not as much as a more professional-looking camera would have, but it was still bigger and looked unusual and people seemed more conscious of being photographed despite the “stealth” aspects of the swiveling and almost silent shutter. My Canon looked like a “typical” digital camera similar to what other people were using at Dance Marathon, and dancers seemed more prone to ignore it, so there was less interference between me and my subjects.
I initially planned on taking both photographs and digital audio recordings, juxtaposing them to capture the best sense of the event and convey a feeling of ‘being there.’ Music was played continuously and loudly, combined with the sound of the presence of hundreds of people moving, talking, clapping, dancing, and cheering, broken occasionally by speakers and performers. Unfortunately, the digital recorder I was using was unfamiliar and I had a trickier time than I expected: I thought I had taken at least an hour of sound recording, but when I checked afterwards I had nothing but a quiet whir. I also had a tricky time taking pictures from a distance in the dark. I don’t have a lot of experience with photography, or a lot of technical skill, and trying to take shots of a crowd in the dark (about half the event) was difficult. The quality of those shots was lower, and I couldn’t zoom in much at all afterwards because they seemed much grainier. Dance Marathon, of course, happens exactly once a year—that twenty-four hours is all you get, so once I took my photos and recordings, that was all I had to work with; nothing could be redone. I ended up with about three hundred pictures at the end (a lot of them were multiple shots of the same subject to make sure I got at least one that turned out), some fraction of which were quite good—my favorite is the picture taken in the dark with the glowsticks.
An extremely important aspect of Dance Marathon is the element of time: it would not be the same event if it took place for two or three or even twelve hours. The event was not a relay—each dancer pledged to stay at the event, awake and on their feet, for the full twenty-four hours. Although adherence was not one hundred percent, for those who stayed the time frame demanded a level of commitment and created an atmosphere of increasing exhaustion that was almost tangible. There was also a quality of physicality: it was, after all, a Dance Marathon, and the participants were expected to be not merely present and accounted for but on their feet and ideally dancing with some energy for the entire duration of the event. Most important, of course, was the cause, which pervaded every aspect of the event, from the t-shirts to the decorations to the speakers.
I decided to arrange the photos as a strip after I looked at the thumbnails and noted the light-dark-light continuum. That transition made visible the sense of the passage of time from day to night to the next day, which was such an important part of the feeling of the event. Because of the flash, the difference in light for close-ups vs. distance in the dark, the difference in light inside versus outside, etc. the photos were not perfectly arranged in a light-dark-light continuum when arranged in exact chronological order, so I made the decision to change the order slightly to the make the light-dark-light cycle more obvious. I was a little torn because I wanted the strip to capture the progression of the event through time, so ultimately the photos I moved slightly were the ones that were situated within a particular period during the event (for example, pictures of people starting to fall asleep in corners in the early morning) but not restricted to an exact time, while I left in place those particular to a moment (such as the photograph taken of people jumping in excitement at 11:59 on Sunday, one minute before the event finished). The times on the photo strip are for one of the pictures surrounding them, not necessarily the precise time for the main strip. The times on the photo explanation pages are accurate. The photos are cropped to squares so that they lay out neatly.
Most of the photographs are bright, like the event itself: bright blue and yellow shirts, neon signs, and red (for AIDS) everywhere. I had to make some trade-offs in deciding to print: I couldn’t make the pictures display as a long strip on the computer with all of them simultaneously visible, but I did like the glow of backlighting that they had the computer that was lost in the reflected light of printed photos. All of the photos seemed a little less bright and translucent once they were printed, and I photoshopped just a few of them (such as the glowstick picture) to try to make them a little closer to what they looked like on the screen.
I also took a lot of photos that weren’t of people. “The event itself” was on one level the clump of people dancing in the center of the gym, but a long string of photos of people dancing would not convey a sense of what it was like to be there. Instead, I took both “scene-setting shots” and “detail shots.” From the perspective of a dancer (the perspective of one who was ‘being there’), the event was not a clump of people dancing but a series of moments and details. So I took pictures of the material culture of Dance Marathon: the hand-painted signs, the site (Roble gym), the piles of red ribbons, etc. I also took pictures of the overlooked corners and details that most of the dancers never looked at too closely but which also formed a commentary on the event: the piles of water bottles building up along the edges of the room, the collection of items on the stage and on tables—the things that people judged necessary to have on hand but didn’t want to carry, snacks and drinks and cameras and sweatshirts and programs. These pictures are messy, like the event itself, which got steadily more cluttered and dirty as it went on and began to reflect the presence of hundreds of people for a full day.
Last year Dance Marathon was featured as a story in the Stanford Daily, the San Jose Mercury News, etc. and although the pictures taken by reporters were quite good, they only captured one moment of the event. Most of the reporters only came for a few hours at most, and the tone of the event was constantly changing as it went on, people got tired, the speakers changed the mood, etc. As I was there for twenty-four hours, I tried to combine a lot of pictures of static moments: twenty-four (one for each hour) pictures primarily of participants, and twenty-four more of primarily the material culture. I also drew on Ruth Tringham’s comments on using a collage to give meaning to a photograph (where each photograph adds to and changes the meaning of the others) and the element of photojournalism (forming a story through sequence of pictures). Of course, being there for the full twenty-four hours had its price: by the end I was as exhausted and sore as everyone else, and it was harder to focus on photography.
The section following on “The Photographs” is not intended so much to provide a precise caption for each photograph as it is to contextualize them, to provide a setting in which the meaning behind each photograph becomes more apparent. Some give history, some are descriptions or stories from the event, some are personal accounts. The stories that accompany each photograph do not just reflect on the single photograph but on the event as a whole.
