I started tango first because I could not dance at all and tango inspired me as it felt different to other dances. Later, I started taking photography seriously thanks to tango. "Tango photography" is not a profession. I know how to dance tango, I follow tango classes and enjoy it but, as I usually do too many things at the same time, I cannot really focus on social dancing, hence I rarely dance.
I started writing this text as a topic for the F.A.Q. page but it grew up longer and somewhat more constructed than expected.
I kept it in the vault for some time but I think that it makes sense to publish it now as I'm shooting more photos in places where less people know me, like Flanders and, at the time I write this line, in Berlin (where most people seem to have no clue what a "tango photographer" is1). And as I am usually more inspired by shooting than dancing, many people don't necessarily perceive how I relate to tango and how things actually were born in tango and evolved to photography and not the other way around.
For most of my life I have been terrified by dancing events. Whenever some friends brought me by force or by accident to some discotheque, told me dancing is fun and that "You just have to let it go!", I would wonder what exactly I have to "let go"? And why I could not simply enjoy the moment and the music that was playing (even though I would often consider it a very poor "mainstream radio-friendly" selection having the worst lyrics ever written) and why I should mimic such meaningless gesticulations that were performed all around the place. Dancing wasn't something that I could see any fun in and I would then get seriously pissed off if the person insisted.4 These situations usually weren't a result of my own free will anyway.
Around 2009, after trying my father's "bridge camera", I started to enjoy shooting photos of anything and started to permanently carry a compact camera in my pocket. Back then, I was only using automatic mode and did not want to "edit" my photos at all.
Later, during a "communication" evening class, a recently met friend with quite a technical profile, and who had unsuccessfully asked me a few times to try salsa, did a "free subject" presentation about how a milonga works. And, apart from the usual clichés anybody may have seen about it, that was my very first introduction to tango. "How a milonga works"... Such a weird approach when I think about it now...
Later on, while chatting, she suggested that I should try tango. (Not with her as she had a permanent partner by then and was most likely already more advanced than me.)
As I saw a few tango photos and videos through various kinds of streaming and social media, the idea of giving tango a try started to grow on me. It looked like that dance had something different that could make some sense to me that other dances never could.
A few months later (July 2013), when I could fit some tango classes in my agenda, I finally tried it and enjoyed it.
Then I had to start thinking about what I should say in situations where I used to reply that I was unable to dance at all and I started to understand why I ever wanted to try tango. The reason is that it is not what I call a "shaky" dance. OK, there are rythm and musicality in tango, but the movements are based on some kind of geometry and logics.
This impression got confirmed rather quickly by reading some page about "tango and engineers" (of which the author became a friend, less than a year later). With tango, I can at least dance a little bit but I still cannot dance any "shaky" dance... and I do not really enjoy dancing milonga2. (Though I like to hear and shoot it, especially happy milongas that make smily photos.)
Tango and photography were still distinct hobbies for me and I still found it weird to shoot dancing people in general.
In August/September 2013, I took a four-morning training to learn taking photos in manual mode.
In September, as I had enough time and thought it would be interesting to learn from multiple schools, I tried another tango class which was directly followed by a milonga. So I already knew the theory but I also got a chance to observe a real milonga quite early in my learning.
Some more things I enjoyed about tango events: music not played unnecessarily loud, friendly people not behaving stupidly (most of the time), no social obligation to get drunk, ...
Then I was following two schools, and for a few months I've been following beginnner levels in three different schools at the same time. I think it is indeed better to learn from multiple sources in order to select and combine what feels good for you. But three classes were difficult to fit in one's agenda on a long term.
I randomly shot photos at a few tango events between September and December 2013, but those were still mostly what I would call "tourist" shots. (Two albums from that period were later published: 26/10/2013 Tango in metro Thieffry and 15/11/2013 Martina Waldman y Jose Fernandez at Projection Room .3)
End of 2013, I finally gave a serious try to "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom" (which is quite different from "Adobe Photoshop"!) and magically transformed some of the previous shots into "acceptable" pictures, including one very lucky shot with a very heavy and lucky editing that ended up as my Facebook page's profile picture. (I lost the editing files for that album, that's the only time it happened, and I did not find how to re-work these photos before May or June 2014.)
On the same week-end, I was at some not-too-crowded milonga (organised by Raphaël/Socieded Tango) where I knew almost everybody. I had already seen some other tango photographers' photos (such as Peter Forret, Christian Fabris, Jean-Pierre Bataille, Claude Chen...) and found their works inspiring. Fred Omskerk and Ivo Chauveaux were the event's official photographers. JPB and Peter Forret showed up too but were not necessarily shooting. Tim was also there, playing with a low budget camera, maybe a mobile phone. Following all this inspiration and helped by the fact that I knew everybody in the place, this was the first event where I grew up the intention to make a photo album.
Then followed two months of struggle with finding the correct position to Lightroom's exposure cursor on desperately underexposed shots. That was also the time when I still would find any tango movement or position impressive and beautiful and selected too many of them. (Initially I used to let people select them in private. Great, I whish I could still actually work like this, but that's definitely too much communication and file management... kind of like a full time job, but unpaid.)
On the 14th February 2014, I got a chance to use JPB's DSLR for a night and discovered that even in a moderately low light tango place like Cellule 133a it was possible to get actually OVERexposed shots. But overall, shooting with Canon EOS 5D Mark III and an insane low light prime lense (85mm f/1.2) made the editing a lot easier and produced a wider colour range.
A few weeks later, I bought a slightly less expensive full frame DSLR (Canon EOS 6D) with two different prime lenses (50mm f/1.8 which I don't use anymore and 35mm f/1.4 which depending on contexts is still one of my favourites).
What came next was just the natural continuation ... I do a better selection now though not perfect yet, I do better photos now than when I started (tought I'm not always satisfied yet and selection threshold depends on the event context), and a large majority of people actually like being on photos when they are good, hence I'm less shy about shooting "strangers". (And I may have a project which, if it goes fine, may help with some people's privacy concerns, but that's not ready yet.)
I could go on a little further but right now I prefer to stop here.
TC, January 2015
Last modification, January 2022