I was particularly caught by her documentation of the performance work Craneway Event (2010) as it relates to this class. The piece itself is a nearly 2-hour long 16 millimeter film set in a San Francisco industrial building. It is a collaboration of sorts with master choreographer Merce Cunningham, who also appears as one of the subjects.
Dean herself believes she's "really never been able to do a single image. I’ve always worked in sequential images, everything always had a narrative." The viewer gets the sense that this sequential narrative space is indeed the one in which Dean is most comfortable. However, while the documentation stills from Craneway Event do fare better as a set, her success with it has at least partially hinged on the ability of each image to stand alone. Perhaps this is true for the majority of her work (see Kodak [2006] for another example).
A significant element of Craneway Event is the play of light streaming through the large windows, partially silhouetting the subjects and creating a pleasing inverted symmetry. Dean: "I always choose situations where the light is very important. The light is always a character. Craneway Event [is] so much about the light, in fact, the light is on equal footing with the dancers."
The documentation of Craneway Event makes for good imagery by itself, but also for a compelling life portrait of a man and his work. Through the choreography, the setting, and the hand of the artist, we sense both Cunningham's history and the Craneway building's history.
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