THE DANCER PORTRAIT PROJECT
William Frederking has been photographing dance and dancers in Chicago since 1989. As a faculty member of the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago for thirty-four years, he taught studio lighting and performance photography. In 2013, Frederking began a personal project he calls Transcendence: Dancer Portraits. The focus of this project has been three-fold: to capture moments of deep union between a dancer and their dance, to provide pro-bono solo “movement portraits” to current dance artists, and to document the beauty, scope, diversity, and depth of Chicago dance.  He will add select images from the project to his recently established digital dance archive of over 4,000 images at the Newberry.