joffrey ballet Archives - Angela Cappetta

Ballet unplugged. I was pleasantly surprised with a front page feature on Newsweek / The Daily Beast ‘s innovative photography page called Picture Dep’t. Accordingly, I even got a smashing write up on the work. Enjoy it here.

The work is all medium format , shot with real black and white film, with a Fuji camera. Also, I used a Lumedyne flash as I shot this body of work. Mostly it was two solid years of me trying not to get kicked in the head.

Newsweek:

Newsweek is an American weekly magazine founded in 1933.

Between 2008 and 2012, Newsweek experienced financial difficulties, leading to the cessation of print publication and a transition to all-digital format at the end of 2012. The print edition was relaunched in March 2014.

However, revenue declines prompted an August 2010 sale by owner The Washington Post Company to audio pioneer Sidney Harman. The purchase price was one dollar and an assumption of the magazine’s liabilities.^[3] Later that year, Newsweek merged with the news and opinion website The Daily Beast, forming The Newsweek Daily Beast Company.

Newsweek was jointly owned by the estate of Harman and the diversified American media and Internet company IAC.^[4]^[5] In 2013, IBT Media announced it acquired Newsweek from IAC; so, the acquisition included the Newsweek brand and its online publication, but did not include The Daily Beast.^[6] IBT Media rebranded itself as Newsweek Media Group in 2017, but, returned to IBT Media in 2018 after making Newsweek independent^[7].

Interview + Picture by Angela Cappetta

What They Were Thinking is an homage to the now defunct NY Times Magazine “What Were They Thinking” column, featuring a photograph and an interview with the subject. Below, you’ll see an interview with Molly McSherry, whom I photographed while she was a trainee at the Joffrey Ballet in NYC.

“I was a senior in high school when this picture was taken…It was my first year on my own in the city. Coming from a small town, I’d never been exposed to the styles of dancing I was being thrown into at Joffrey–to be honest, this was probably one of the first times I was moving through the floor and working with the horizontal plane. I’m not sure I even knew I had the option to lie down. Everything was vertical before I came to New York, but nothing’s been the same since I got here.”