Dancessence is an exceptional quality, hand-crafted book of dancer figure photographs, and is now available at Amazon.

The book is highly unusual in its photographic process, design, and use of natural materials. It is best described as a book/portfolio of simple, exquisite, slightly abstract images of female dancers. The work is created with film (not digitally) in a manual camera using long exposures and a "light painting" technique. The dancers maintain static positions while being photographed but imagine themselves in motion, suspended in time and space. The result is soft, ethereal images somewhat resembling charcoal drawings, which capture the emotion of dance and celebrate the pure sculpture and power of the dancers' bodies.

An Afterword was written by Lois Greenfield, one of Eastman's early teachers, and arguably the leading professional dance photographer working today.

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 Dancessence Technical Notes

Reviews of Dancessence

“I first met Hal Eastman as a beginning student attending a dance photography workshop I gave in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1999. He was an unusual student, because instead of pursuing the art and technique of stop action photography, one of my specialties, he experimented with taking longer, blurred exposures of the dancers.

“This poetic vision eventually developed into his first book, Natural Dance, published in 2003. It depicts magical images of nymph-like dancers playing in natural settings. Now Eastman has moved into the studio, refining this technique to emphasize only the essential contours of the dancers' movement and bodies in a softened, ethereal way.

“In this pursuit, it is interesting to note that he has utilized a technique for photographing dance that was necessary before modern strobe lights could stop the action. Like earlier photographers, Eastman places the dancers in static positions that connote movement. However, he then uses very long exposures and "light painting" to create a softened effect. The dancers' faces are obscured, thus they become pure forms, floating in a sea of black . . . abstract, graphic and illusory.

“Critics have often maintained that very sharp literal photographic renditions of dancers ‘frozen’ in flight don't fully express the emotional aspects of their movement. However, in Eastman's work, we get a synthesis of the literal and emotional, spawning a whole new vision.”
      — Lois Greenfield, dance photographer