“Ghosts, Aliens, and Maidens: Soichi Sunami’s Intense Sympathy of Vision” by Kyle McCarthy

Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami
Accompanying essay by David F. Martin
Distributed by University of Washington Press

Dance is the art that disappears. Often, all that remains are the photographs. But studying old dance photographs is often strange: how ridiculous and perfumed it can all seem. Is this sylph with her leg so low, her foot so poorly arched, really the legendary Anna Pavlova? Could this blocky fellow with the massive thighs and windswept gaze really be Nijinsky? (That he was one of the three greatest male ballet dancers of the twentieth century is beyond debate—a remarkable fact, considering that there is no recording of his dancing, and that no one alive today ever saw him perform.)

So when a photographer who understands dance intelligence meets a dancer who knows how to pose, the results are eagerly clutched, becoming less a souvenir of dance history than dance history itself. Arguably, it is not Nijinsky’s dancing that lives with us, but the collection of photographs of him made famous by Lincoln Kirsten and then Edwin Denby’s written commentary.

But what of early American modern dance? Studying the grainy footage of Isadora Duncan twirling with her emblematic scarves, I find it hard to understand the fuss. Indeed, not until a friend pushed Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami into my hands did I feel I could start to build a bridge between the dance I see onstage today and the grande dames who brought us here.

For of all the photographs of early American modern dancers, Sunami’s come closest for me of conveying something of the wildness and daringness of that time. In his photographs, we see how the flowy scarves and grand appropriated gestures of the teens and twenties gradually give way to stark modernism of the thirties. But Sunami, like the world he photographed, was nearly lost. Before the Cascadia Art Museum’s retrospective of his work, his name was virtually unknown, even among dance aficionados and champions of artists from the Pacific Northwest.

Born in Okayama City, Japan in 1885, Soichi Sunami emigrated to Seattle at the age of twenty-one, where he labored for a laundry, a lumber camp, and the railroad before the photographer Wayne Albee, recognizing his incipient talent, invited him to come work in one of his studios in Tacoma. From Albee, Sunami met the great impresario Ruth St. Denis; from St. Denis and her Denishawn school, he entered the world of modern dance, and for the next twenty years, first in Seattle and then in New York, Sunami photographed the founding mothers of the burgeoning field: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Edna Guy, and Agnes de Mille.

A master of Pictorialism, that funny sleight-of-hand in which photography tries to turn itself back into painting, Sunami photographed landscapes with light smeared and bleary enough to resemble Impressionist watercolors and dancers still and marbled enough to resemble sculpture: here is Ruth St. Denis draped in what must be half an acre of gauzy fabric, standing contrapposto, her lips heavily darkened, her arm outstretched and her head tilted back like a glamorous movie star; here is her husband, Ted Shawn, posed as a character named ‘Life,’ in a loincloth, standing before two Grecian maidens preening like mermaids. In these early photographs, modern dance can seem nothing but a close cousin to the Victorian tableaux vivants, with their great billowing folds of fabric and dramatic poses. Everything is working to become something else.

Indeed, as innovators such as Ruth St. Denis worked to create a distinctly American art form, they borrowed freely and sloppily from the dance of Asia and Africa, quoting phrases and gestures that had almost no basis in fact. As Ruth St. Denis herself cheerfully admitted, according to the critic Walter Terry, “not one of her dances was authentic in the ethnic sense, for all she knew about Oriental dancing was what she saw at Coney Island and what she found in encyclopedias.”

Accordingly, much of Sunami’s earlier work is painful to see: Ruth St. Denis dressed as a Chinese goddess, draped in white gauze, flanked by faux jade plants; or the chiseled white dancer Jacques Cartier, nearly nude, his body painted black, a headdress nearly a yard high tufting wildly from his head, performing his “Voo-Doo Dance” upon a giant tom-tom drum. This last was one of Sunami’s most commercially successful photographs, reproduced abroad and in Vogue magazine. 

Yet even as he was meeting the Caucasian craze for exotica, Sunami clearly understood that he too could become the object of fascination and derision. He had arrived in America just before the “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the US and Japan restricted immigration in 1907, and waited fifty years for US citizenship. During the internment of Japanese Americans, Sunami destroyed nearly all of his nude photos of white women.

Did this awareness of his own vulnerability translate into greater empathy for his subjects? David F. Martin’s accompanying catalog essay notes that Sunami was one of the only ones to photograph dancers from the Negro Arts Theater, a groundbreaking theater troupe, as well as Edna Guy, a prominent Black modern dancer. His 1932 nude photographs of Guy lack the white obsession with the Black body; you sense he is not photographing her as a specimen, but as a person, interested in the tilt of her head, the poetry of her clavicles. Perhaps he knew what it was like to be read as a type.

Then the flowy romanticism of the past falls away, and there is only Martha Graham in a long straight shift, sleek and striped. Dance has become as stark and clear as a cleaver to the head. 

Unlike earlier dancers, Graham holds tremendous tension in her body. While before the body is smooth, soft, or flowing, openly nostalgic for an imagined past, here the arms are held rigid and the focus is on the face. Sunami’s photographs, too, change. The dancers are shot more closely cropped, and in strong contrast. The positions of the bodies are more extreme: backs arched, heads thrown back, the whitened faces leaping out against the black backdrop. His ideals of Pictorialism have been left behind. 

In the photograph from Primitive Canticle (1931), Graham’s right arm is raised and bent at the elbow; her left fingertips touch her earlobe, as if she is receiving signals from outer space. And though her face is theatrically whitened and her stance unmistakably posed, her downward gaze suggests introspection. The messages she receives are just for her.

Here she looks like a woman, albeit one who communes with aliens, but in Sunami’s photographs of her from Lamentation she becomes something else. Her face, white as a kabuki performer, is distorted. She twists her lips and misaligns her jaw, as if it has been knocked askew. With her darkened eyelids and heavy, flat eyebrows, she has managed to make her face both a mask and a scream. In another photograph of ‘Lamentation,’ she crouches, the pale shroud of her dress stretched tightly across her thighs. She looks like something newly born, pulling free from its caul.

Many of the photographers we most admire reveal what their subjects might rather stay hidden (Diane Arbus) or examine closely a stretch of landscape others have overlooked (Walker Evans). But Sunami photographed people who wanted to be photographed, posed as they wished to be posed. These were humans of enormous dance intelligence, who knew how to make their bodies fill the frame. Sunami extended and highlighted the force they already put out; his dance photographs pop so vividly not because he sneakily exposed his subject, but rather because he collaborated. In his photographs you sense his sympathy of vision.

Paging through his catalog, I feel I’m looking at ghosts lured onto film, lost in their own private dramas. The costumes are outlandish, the arms stark, the thighs and buttocks tense with effort. In the photographs I can feel how the expressive qualities of a splayed hand or opened palm are being newly discovered. I feel the terrible urgency of making something new.

Kyle McCarthy is the author of the novel Everyone Knows How Much I Love You. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Selected Shorts, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.