Portrait session with pole dancing artist Donna Carnow, whose skills and strength truly defy gravity. Here’s some of the images we created through our recent collaboration.
Interested in the flow of movement during dancing acts and the way this can be captured through photography, I mostly used slow-shutter speeds to capture the flow of Donna’s movements and emphasize on the overall movement rather than instants of it.
We used a single LED light with variable colour hues for the most part of the shoot, and combined it with a few speedlight flashes for some of the images to freeze motion. I wanted the color palette for the shoot to be vibrant, bold and always changing like the motion in most pole-dancing acts.
Donna Carnow (she/her) - is a Brooklyn-based pole dancer, aerial pole artist, choreographer, teacher, performer, national pole champion, and human pretzel-tornado.
Donna’s performative abilities have been celebrated in the New York Times, Variety, The New Yorker, The New York Post, Theatermania, and more. She is the Pole Sport Organization 2022 US National Pole Art Champion where “she POLE the show” (New York Post). Donna is also known for starring in the off-broadway show Seven Deadly Sins NYC in Bess Wohl’s play, LUST, voiced by Cynthia Nixon. Her performance was described as the “production’s true showstopper” (New York Times). Currently, Donna is a soloist in Company XIV’s production of Nutcracker Rouge, a resident artist at The Slipper Room, and a regular performer in nightlife, circus, and competition spaces + productions worldwide.
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