Atlanta Arts category interest

Charlie McCullers gained the trust of Atlanta Ballet dancers over 20 years as the company’s principal photographer. Now 50 of his most intimate images are in a new exhibit at Spalding Nix Fine Art.

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After two decades as principal photographer of the Atlanta Ballet, Charlie McCullers admits he still doesn’t know the basics of ballet. But he doesn’t need to. While most dance fans are focused on the finished product of finely rehearsed performances, McCullers has long been intrigued by the more intimate and vulnerable moments backstage and the hundreds of hours of grueling practice time preceding those brief pirouettes and leaps in the spotlight.

“I worked my way into the world of the dancers and became their confidant,” said McCullers, who worked as the Atlanta Ballet’s principal photographer from 2000 to 2020. “After about three years, I realized we may be onto something here, having access to this private environment, which is truly a privilege, and pursuing it with the dancers in my off time. It gave me insight into their world and it created trust.”

Now those more intimate moments — images that never made it into the ballet season brochure or dance poster — will have their time to shine as well. An exhibit based on 20 years of McCullers photographing Atlanta Ballet dancers opened at Buckhead’s Spalding Nix Fine Art on September 13.

Running until November 8, Silk Asylum: Refuge Among the Sylphs features 50 images, most of which have never been seen before, examining the enigmatic relationship between dancers and their craft.

Expect large, striking, black and white photos of ballet life behind the curtain; of performers waiting sleepily in the wings; of industrial-looking dressing rooms packed with dancers rushing on makeup; of the lifelines of toe marks streaked across the practice Marley floor like Jackson Pollock brushstrokes. These are not your grandfather’s dance shots.

“I’ve done a lot of different types of photography, but this one project going on for 20 years may be my favorite,” said McCullers. “It started as an observation, but I didn’t want to be the guy who was simply passive with a camera. I wanted to be part of the process.” So he went from being an observer to being an active participant with the dancers in a collaboration that extended beyond the performances and his official role as company photographer into the more personal and private moments of backstage life.

These experiments later evolved into shoots farther and farther away from the stage and into wooded areas, industrial sites, during studio sessions and rehearsals and even on bus trips. “Atlanta Ballet was behind it the whole way,” said McCullers. “They saw the value behind telling people who these dancers are outside their stage performances.”

With a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Georgia and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, McCullers has carved out a career that, like this Silk Asylum exhibit, defies easy classification while also flexing a ride range. Over four decades based in Atlanta, he’s become renowned for multiple big-scale projects, including the Sir Elton John Chorus of Light exhibit at the High Museum of Art in 2000-01 and recent work chronicling barrier islands off the Georgia and Florida coasts.

In 2016, he exhibited a show similar to Silk Asylum. It was a special retrospective of little-or-never-before-seen images of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. However, paring down thousands of potential images of ballet dancers to just 50 and crafting a coherent body of work out of that variety and shift in time has proven one of the real challenges of McCullers’ career.

A ballet dancer’s career is short, and the performers McCullers interacted with in years past were a totally different cast of characters than those he shot more recently. As he grew older, he got close with some of them. There were new faces as well, season to season. “Maybe that’s the point of a 20-plus year project, to witness the growth,” he said.

The experience began to affect how McCullers approached photography altogether. “I started feeding off identifying the personas of hundreds of different dancers, each with their own idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, strengths and vulnerabilities,” he said. “Figuring that out and putting it into a visual interpretation, it’s the best puzzle in the world you could try to unlock.”

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