Lois Greenfield

If I knew what the photograph was going to look like, I wouldn't bother taking it. It's the voyage of discovery that fascinates me.

Being called a dance photographer makes me bristle. You might say that dance is my landscape. The root of my interest is movement or, rather, how movement can be interpreted photographically, and dance provides a perfect opportunity for this.

I shoot just one moment at a time... These moments are beneath the threshold of perception.

Working improvisationally in my studio with dancers, it's completely different. We don't have any starting point; we don't have an end point. We don't have anything we are trying to show or do. The picture evolves from nowhere.

I don't digitally manipulate my images, because I am interested in the spontaneous act of creating images without forethought. I know many artists start with an idea in mind, and then they put it on paper. I don't work that way.

My inspiration has always been photography's ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see.

What intrigues me is making images that confound and confuse the viewer but that the viewer knows, or suspects, really happened.

I realized that one of the differences between news photography and dance photography was that the former has to tell a specific story, whereas all a dance photograph had to be was visually interesting.

The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.

My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.