As an artist I am constantly striving for new ways to express the vast array of swirling emotions within my being, and living in Baltimore has inspired the dance piece I am currently finishing: “Baltimore…the Dirty-B.” The piece explores the contrast I see among the resident hobo, downtown lawyer, wealthy socialite, and gang leader in Baltimore, and plays with the way different worlds co-exist. This is a concept that reaches far beyond my backdoor, to cities throughout America. But Baltimore has developed in a way that intensifies this harsh contrast, with dangerous back-allies and “blue-light districts” (the blue lights indicate heavy crime areas) interwoven among high-rent skyscrapers and fine-dining restaurants.  The movement in the dance is introspective and dark, with a little narrative quality. The composition is split into four sections, with a combination repeating in the beginning, middle, and end of each section, demonstrating that section’s theme. Each section is dedicated to a different worldview in Baltimore. The first three are: the wealthy couple shopping for wares, the desperate homeless family struggling to be seen, and the drug dealer on the street corner hiding beneath a cold stare. The last section combines the pieces together.

I’m making the “..the Dirty-B” for my new dance company, The Golden Dance Experiment, a professional contemporary ensemble with a focus on modern dance and contemporary ballet.  All of the dance performed by The Golden Dance Experiment will feature music by the company’s resident composer, Seth Milder. Seth is trained in classical and electric guitar, electric bass, and electronic music composition. Last year I formed The University of Baltimore Contemporary Dance Company as an arts education program for University of Baltimore students interested in dance. The company is a little piece of my soul — I make all costumes, choreograph all pieces, teach all technique classes, create all marketing materials, and organize all photo shoots. It’s a labor of love for me, and I am very proud of the students who participated in it this year. “Linked in Motion,” is a piece I originally composed for The University of Baltimore Contemporary Dance Company based on a poem I wrote. For that piece, Seth and I combined his classical guitar with my vocal recording of the poem, adding in electronic waves of sound to intensify the auditory experience. We performed the piece at the Baltimore Theater Project’s recent ‘Open Marley Night,’ and based on positive feedback I am working to add a second section to the piece for The Golden Dance Experiment. For the second part of “Linked in Motion”, my plan is to incorporate my flute playing along with new guitar work. The choreography is a modern trio with airy and soft movement. I hope that the connection between the dancers and the poetry create an understanding of the way our closest relationships are like trickling rivers, climbing up and down a mountain and dripping slowly into a still pond.

I frequently start my choreographic process by transferring my ideas into drawings I make in a visual journal.  From these images I develop movement concepts and a structure for the choreography.  This process helps me take my ideas to new places I would never see by working from dance improvisation alone. I’m regularly inspired by dance artists I have worked with in the past, visual art, live African drumming, classical ballet and choreographers and companies including Paul Taylor, Jose Limon, Merce Cunningham, and the American Ballet Theater. Ballet was my life while growing up, but as a student of the James Madison University Theater and Dance program, I began to make the switch from ballerina to contemporary dance artist.  In 2009 I graduated and began to dance professionally, with AriDen Dance Company and DanceAntonini, and both companies have influenced my work as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer.

Last month I was asked to lead a lecture-demonstration for a local elementary school hip-hop dance event.  I jumped at the idea, and at the Hip-Hop Dance Party at Stoneleigh Elementary School, 100+ boys and their mothers were entertained with a hip-hop duet I choreographed and performed with The University of Baltimore Contemporary Dance Company member Sue Wu. We rocked the crowd by combining hip-hop, break-dance, and contemporary partnering. The performance was followed by a thirty-minute lesson where I taught the students a section of the hip-hop duet, and led the students in a dance improvisation exercise. Dance is my joy, my passion, and my way of life, and I hope you’ll check out The Lindsey Golden Project website, which includes a detailed calendar of events, as well as original poetry, dance blogs, video of past performances, and photo galleries.

Lindsey Golden graduated from James Madison University with a B.A. in Justice Studies and a minor in Dance. During her training she performed with the Fairfax Ballet, as well as JMU contemporary dance companies The Associate Dance Ensemble, Contemporary Dance Ensemble and the Virginia Repertory Dance Company. Lindsey performed at the American College Dance Festival twice, and was honored to perform in the Gala Concert in 2008. Ms. Golden began her professional career performing with modern dance companies based in the Washington D.C. area: DanceAntonini and AriDen Dance Company. In 2011, Lindsey began to focus her attention on choreography and arts education by forming the University of Baltimore Contemporary Dance Company.  The company was featured in “The Open Marley Night” at the Baltimore Theater Project. In 2012, Lindsey became a member of Dance Baltimore, and branched off to direct and perform with the professional contemporary ballet and modern company, The Golden Dance Experiment.  The Lindsey Golden Project website reflects all of Ms. Golden’s artistic works including poetry, music compositions, and dance choreography, as well as news articles and blogs regarding upcoming events: http://lindseygolden.com.

I work with a large format camera, a heavy steel contraption that is older than I am, which puts images onto 8×10 inch sheets of film. With my tripod attached, the camera weighs about 40 pounds, and people often ask me why I bother using this sort of camera. To keep things simple, I often tell them that I love the sharpness and dense tonality of the prints that are ultimately produced from such big negatives, but honestly, this is only about half the truth, and not the half that really matters. The real truth is that the most essential thing I get from my enormous camera is focus—not in the sense of lenses and light but in terms of my own attention. The large camera helps me focus, and see.

For me to produce an image, I carry my 40-pound camera—which I prop over my shoulder, like an old musket—through the landscape until I find something that seems relevant to me. I then set up the camera, and focus it with a dark cloth over my head. I calculate an exposure based on the available light, and then shoot, exposing a single sheet of film, which I eventually develop by hand in trays of chemicals in my darkroom. After the negative is produced, it has to be printed, which involves several hours in the darkroom. I also perform several campaigns of hand-work on each print, first with a solution of reducer (or “bleach”) applied with watercolor brushes in order to lighten areas of the print, and then with neutral watercolor to add tone and texture to areas of the image that I still feel need adjustment. Creating a single print involves at least 8 hours of my time, and sometimes considerably more. This whole lengthy process is always in my mind as I look for my next photograph, and it forces me to make choices, to decide what I think is really important and what is really worth capturing.

In this day and age, when one can take a photograph with an iPhone and moments later post it to an online album or print it out on a desktop inkjet, spending 8 hours to create a photographic image may seem like an absurd difficulty. But I feel that this difficulty adds something fundamental to my work. Things that have been labored over for a long time express the care and attention given them, even if not always in an overt manner.

It’s less a question of perfection than of character— think of a chair handmade by a woodworker, or a bowl hand-thrown by a ceramist. In many ways these objects are less perfect, less seamless, than plastic chairs or bowls cast at a factory in China and sold by the millions at Wal-Mart, and yet they are so much more alive! I choose the big camera and the long process because for me, the difficulty of working with this equipment and these materials parallels the difficulty of struggling to truly see—and truly appreciate—the world around me.

I recently completed a series called “Ways to Lexington”, which is a group of landscapes of the Shenandoah Valley made more or less in response to the recent decline and death of my grandparents, who lived in Lexington, VA since before I was born. I had initially intended the work to portray my bright recollections of the landscape around my grandparents’ old farmhouse, but the events taking place in my life at the time ended up seeping into the work and coloring it in somewhat darker tones.

I am engaged in the physical and technical photographic process because through it I am able to share a part of myself that really sees with whoever cares to look. Every series is different, but they are bound together by an attempt to look at the landscape and find something in it that is both particular to me and engaging to others.

Andrew Zimmermann is an Arlington, Virgina based photographer who works with large format cameras. His work has been widely exhibited around the Washington, DC area and in numerous venues throughout the United States. He recently received a Professional Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for his body of work “Common Place”, which documents the landscape within one mile of his suburban home in Arlington.

To see more of the artist’s work, check out his website: www.andrewzphotographs.com