The act of photography is a kind of interpretive dance. One partner holds a pose or swings their arms, and the other circles around and sometimes drops to the floor. Their movements, captured on film, tell a story or depict an emotion. This is what subconsciously drew New York-based photographer Camila Falquez — a former ballet dancer — to the art form. “What connected me to dance was the fact that it was a language I understood and was able to communicate through,” she says. “But I didn’t like the technical rules ballet imposed. My ballet teacher used to beg me to be less expressive when I performed. I guess that’s why I eventually quit.” Camila, who was born in Mexico City and raised in Barcelona, then turned to photography as her method of communication, capturing her subjects through the lens of a dancer. Her emotive images—of Senegalese wrestlers at sunset and Greek sculptures in Florence—focus in on the body and its limitless forms and movements. “When I realized how much of my work was about the body,” she reflects, “I came to the conclusion that I am able to see all of this beauty in it because dancing is such a big part of who I am.” Her innate aesthetic sensibility is evident in her personal projects, such as Humanidad aqui arriba, for which she photographed two models, one with milky white skin and the other with dewy mahogany skin, embracing one another. “I felt the need to remind people—and myself—that we are all the same, and that beauty lies in every single one of us,” she explains in the following interview. “I felt that [photography] was the only medium I had to express this.”

Much of your personal work focuses on the body and its movements. Why do you think that is? What fascinates you about the body?
I have to admit that everything that has led my work to this point has been super organic. I hadn’t noticed how much I am fascinated by the movement of the body until one day I reviewed my work and realized that I had been studying it subconsciously over the past five years. That’s what’s amazing about photography—it’s your eye deciding what fragments of reality move you inside: from working with actual dancers in Colombia to running into wrestlers in Senegal to admiring Greek sculptures in Florence. All of that was a very slow creation process, with many other beautiful experiments along the way, which eventually led to my first solo show Body of Work: An Essay on the Body. It was a show that grew very slowly and that happened almost unintentionally. To me, that was the magic of it.
Do you think that studying ballet and contemporary dance when you were growing up had an effect on your outlook as a photographer?
Dancing is absolutely a key piece to the way I see the body and understand its movement. Growing up, I was convinced I was going to be a dancer. I would dance every single evening after school, and every single time I was left alone in my room. And I wouldn’t just dance and jump, I was super experimental with it, which was very funny because I was too young to be taking it that seriously. My range would go from flamenco to salsa to ballet to contemporary dance and jazz. But I didn’t like the technical rules ballet imposed, I was all about feeling it. I understand the body, and I feel I have found a beautiful way of expressing things with it through the camera.

Besides dance, what do you look to for inspiration?
I see beauty everywhere, and I feel that’s such a blessing. My mom, who is an artist, used to walk around picking up little fragments of whatever materials she would find in the street, and then she would make these amazing collages with all of it. That defines exactly how I feel about the world and how it inspires me. It may sound cheesy but, to me, every little corner of the world contains some beauty in it.
What attracts you to take a photo?
Just like with the movement of the body, what motivates me to shoot a picture is a totally unconscious attraction to something I am seeing. I realize that when I am traveling alone, walking around with my camera, my brain doesn’t theorize about what I will shoot, I am just driven by my eyes and what I am attracted to in the most primitive way. It’s my favorite type of meditation. When I develop the pictures is when I am able to study the tendencies I have, not before I shoot. By the results, I think I am mostly driven to color, weird lines that accidentally happen in reality, and to peoples’ expressions and routines.

How did you come to photograph the wrestlers in Senegal? Did you see it as an immediate connection to your other work or did you discover that later?
I was traveling in Dakar and I would wander the city all day long shooting. One day, right when the sun was setting, I was on the beach and saw them from afar and literally ran toward this group of about 30 huge men wrestling. Their bodies are the most beautiful moving things I think I have ever seen. I think it took me a couple minutes for me to react and actually start shooting. I felt I was dancing with them as they fought and fell and yelled. I felt like the luckiest woman alive.

You were recently in Dubai and photographed women there. Since their heads and bodies are covered in niqabs, did your approach to photography change
I actually landed in Dubai right after the elections, and then I shot these pictures. I cannot express with words how sad and confused I was most of my trip. I wrote an email to my closest friends, who are all badass artists, and told them that it was our duty to be the women we are, that it actually means a lot to the world to be the free creative women we are, because in Dubai, women have half the rights we have. And I won’t comment on that too much because I know it’s a complicated subject, full of cultural barriers of the utmost complexity. So in regards to how my approach to photography changed, I think it was just something inside of me that felt like it was very important for me—a young, uncovered woman—to be in front of these veiled girls asking for permission to take their picture. That moment made me feel very grateful to be the woman I am.
If you had to describe your work as one ballet, which one would it be and why?
If Martha Graham, Jonah Bokaer and Sara Baras created a show, and Mulatu Astatke, Diego Cigala and Leonard Cohen made the music, and it was performed in an open-air stage somewhere in the Caribbean, then that would be what, I wish, my work would be like.

Credits
Text Zio Baritaux
Photography courtesy and copyright Camila Falquez