Picking up the family VHS camera to record Motocross adventures in the French countryside: an artist’s earliest experiments don’t often so directly foreshadow how their careers might develop. In the case of Thibaut Grevet, this urge to capture his childhood friends’ feats speaks to the project she’s completed in recent years, with professional models, athletes, and artists—including, now, New York City Ballet dancers. Grevet found himself organically drawn into the art world, where through early documentary captures, particularly amongst skateboarders, he soon met other young artists straddling the worlds of commerce and creativity. Eventually, he began experimenting with DIY and increasingly com-plicated photographic techniques, in an exploratory approach to art making that he still uses today.
“I have a vision, but I think it’s more about understanding mathematically how art works,” Grevet says of his development as an artist. “I think it’s about exploring and learning.” Since completing studies in graphic design, Grevet has created campaign videos for brands like Vans, Converse, Mercedes-Benz, Louis Vuitton, and Calvin Klein, among many others. His work often reflects his ongoing interest in capturing moments of perfection in execution, stutter-stopping time, and abstractions of the human form and landscape. His photography similarly spans the worlds of sports and fashion, all created with an openness of approach that uses analog or digital effects, or a combination of the two. In 2022, he collected a number of photographs he’d taken over the years depicting subjects in motion, publishing the book Blurred. The lasting effect of his work is one of experimentation, a certain playfulness, and curiosity about the movement between movements—what comes before and after a pose or performance.
With [the NYCB] campaign, there are several layers,” Grevet explains. “The first layer is capturing the choreography, which relates to my background in photographing athletes; it’s all about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right angle. The second layer is, how do we bring it to something more artistic? For me, this is the feeling around the dancing—the preparation, the waiting, the training, and the breath before doing the step; this kind of process is similar to other sports.And the third layer is about heritage. I’m really obsessed with looking for old books and references. For example, the use of stop motion; and there is a major homage to Gjon Mili, the photographer that developed this kind of stroboscope photography, with this exposure technique. I brought it into something new with digital techniques. So we have multiple photographic methods, multiple dancers, and multiple images, all in one frame.”
The reference to Mili is particularly appropriate, not only because many of his best-known photographs featured athletes and dancers—including NYCB dancers and portraits of George Balanchine himself—in motion, but also because his approach was firmly situated in experimentation. After studying electrical engineering at MIT in the 1920s, Mili was employed by the Westinghouse Lamp Company to conduct lighting research, all the while testing out new photographic techniques as the technology advanced, on the side. He used a series of flashes for his stroboscopic images, made most famous in LIFE magazine, with photos “taken in 1/100,000th of a second.” As he told LIFE, “Time could truly be made to standstill. Texture could be retained despite sudden violent move-ment.” The same applies beautifully to Grevet’s work, with the addition of digital tools and an embrace of the imprecise, “blurred” moments providing additional such texture to his creations.
“You capture something that is so human, and in the meantime, so inhuman, because what they do with their bodies is so impressive,” Grevet says of working with the NYCB dancers. “I’m sure you can ask them about the stop-motion production and they’ll remember my voice saying every second, ‘And go. And go,’ because I wanted them to be so slow in their movements. It was probably not easy for them, but when they saw the final result, they saw that it works. Honestly, it was amazing.” The result isa rich, atmospheric representation of the Company’s artistry as well as its humanity. “To me, it’s a sum of what they actually do,” he adds, “the training, how they train by themselves—what people might not see when they perform. What they do in the dark and what shows in the light.”
For Grevet, the Art Series commission offers the opportunity to bring this sense of exploration and surprise to visitors to the theater. What makes him “vibrate” on set, he says, is “when you have something in front of your eyes that’s special, but also there are things you can’t really control.” His hope is for the public to experience something similar.
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