Oliver Look

After completing his studies in Freiburg, Germany, Oliver Look (1972) began his professional training as a photographer, later working with a great many well-known musicians and artists before he found his way to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal dance ensemble.

Look’s work is incredibly varied: Alongside classical landscapes he often portrays people from his own personal circle, as well as figures from public life and models. He is happy to swap his reflex camera for a Polaroid, and even works with experimental forms of photography like cyanotype, for example.

His love of experimentation and his talent for capturing emotionally charged moments in his pictures makes it no surprise that he was drawn to the Tanztheater. Oliver Look’s photographs take us along to the city of Wuppertal and into the world of the world-famous dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch and her ensemble. In his subjects he sometimes chooses intimate moments and sometimes room-filling views of choreography, capturing the key moments of a piece. The foreground doesn’t belong to people like it does in his classical portrait shots, but to the reason they take to the stage: the art of dance.

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