Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter

Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter is subtitled “A Celebration of Joy in the Everyday” and it’s a very fitting subtitle. The book is a collection of photographs interspersed with just six very short illustrative stories by Matter about the subjects of dreaming, loving, playing, exploring, grieving, working, and living. The stories are just one to two pages long, leaving the emphasis on the dancers and the beautiful photographs that capture them in action.
What these dancers can do with their bodies is simply amazing. Some of them appear to be levitating. Some are perched precariously from high places. Others are jumping in the rain or snow, and still others are posed in ways that my body certainly does not bend to demonstrate extreme emotions like shame, grief, love, and joy.
The photographs in this book were taken all across the US, plus a few in Canada, in places both well-known and not. The differences in scenes and weather conditions make the photos more visually interesting and lend themselves to the different types of situations and emotions Matter set out to capture.
To learn more about the project and to see videos of how some of these images were captured, go to http://www.dancersamongus.com/.