Les Danseurs

Matthew Brookes’s style of photography leans toward the natural raw emotion of his subjects. In his first book Brookes has turned his lens towards the professional male ballet dancers of Paris. For a year in the life of these dancers he took them out of their regular environment of rehearsals and performances and photographed them in a raw space where they were allowed to explore the physicality of dance in its purest form. This series of portraits depicts the pure physicality of a male dancer where they are asked to interperate birds falling from the sky. The introduction to this series of images is by Parisian prima ballerina Marie Agnus Gillot, who has worked with these dancers over the years and watched them grow and develop both as dancers and as people.