Festival in Motion
In collaboration with Los Angeles Dance Project
Festival in Motion celebrates dance, music, art, and architecture. Set at the heart of the World Cup festivities in Qatar, each project draws inspiration from the public spaces and heritage sites of Qatar to pair international artists for global collaborations.
The art of capturing the art.
Turns out many things grow in the desert. In 2022, I was in Qatar to capture a number of performances, over many days, in and around Doha, during the World Cup. An amazing, but grueling, assignment through which more sights were seen than I could possibly describe or show in this small a space.
Performances would run for a week and each day was divided into three, as multiple performances, utilizing multiple dance companies took place across the region at various site-specific artworks or dedicated museums. Each week, the schedule changed, but for about 4 or 5 days, I could see each performance a few times before the dancers switched to a new piece and new venue.
And in between the performances, the dancers and I made time to explore and create on our own, as well. It was one of the most productive months of my career and the works span thousands of images and a beautiful set of small, spontaneous videos that erupted like small desert sand storms.
Benjamin Millepied + LADP, Be Here Now
Saburo Teshigawara, Fly Me to the Earth
at East-West/West-East, Richard Serra
Richard Serra’s desert installation in Qatar is a study in monumental presence. The journey there invites doubt—until the work reveals itself, silencing analysis and drawing one fully into its scale and silence.
What struck me was not only the vastness, but the mind that dared to meet it. The four monoliths, spaced across the horizon, feel less like interventions than extensions—artifacts of a consciousness expanded to meet the desert’s immensity. In capturing the performance around them, I felt compelled to hover both within and above the site. The scale demands distance, yet in that oscillation—between presence and perspective—I sensed a rare proximity to the artist.
Bouchra Ouizguen, Corbeaux
at Shadows Traveling on the Sea of the Day, Olafur Eliasson
Of the many installations I’ve encountered, Olafur Eliasson’s Shadows Traveling on the Sea of the Day remains among the most exhilarating to photograph. The interplay of reflection and geometry offers an endless visual odyssey—each shift in light reconfigures the landscape anew. I returned twice, each visit over five hours, and would go again without hesitation; the work resists exhaustion.
Though we were there to capture dance unfolding within and around the installation, it was the intervals between performances that became unexpectedly intimate. Left alone with the work, I moved through it deliberately, composition by composition, driven less by documentation than by the quiet thrill of discovery.
Janie Taylor/LADP, Anthem
Mazelfreten, Bis Repetita
at The National Museum of Qatar
Among the most visually arresting museums I’ve encountered, its architecture offered multiple vantage points—each functioning as a kind of proscenium for movement. Over the course of a month, we captured several performances throughout the space. It quickly became one of my favorite locations to shoot: a site of striking shapes, reflections, framing, and ever-shifting light.
Salia Sanou/LADP, La Récréation
Jill Johnson/LADP, New Work
Museum of Islamic Art
The I. M. Pei-designed museum floats out on an artificial peninsula out into the dhow harbor, acting as close to a centerpiece as one might find in the sprawling, rich mish-mash of Doha. In typical I. M. Pei fashion, it exudes meticulousness, finesse and beauty. A number of performances were either here, or nearby on old pearling boats or amidst any number of large commissioned pieces, from the likes of Yayoi Kusama and Richard Serra. An embarrassment of riches, without the embarrassment.
Qatar resists easy comprehension. Nearly everything visible has emerged within the last fifty years—much of it in the past two decades—yet the country remains deeply invested in evoking its heritage. The result is a place that holds two temporalities at once: a landscape of modern ambition layered with gestures toward a historical vernacular.
