The Dancer Portrait Project
Photographer 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 dance photography project he calls Dancer Portraits. The focus of this project is to make pro-bono solo “movement portraits” of individual invited dance artists as part of his project to document the beauty, scope, diversity, and depth of Chicago dance and dance artists.
Dance is physically, financially, and emotionally demanding. With this project, he wants to document and acknowledge the individual dance artists who perform (and have performed) in Chicago and provide them with high quality photographs that will support them in their careers, now. Since his retirement from Columbia College Chicago in 2017, he has devoted much time and energy to scanning and editing analog dance photographs from his dance photography career. With the help of the staff at the Newberry Library, he has recently established a digital dance photo collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago that currently includes over four thousand images. Frederking has photographed over three hundred contemporary dance artists for the Dancer Portrait Project. He will include select images from the project in his digital archive at the Newberry Library.
About William Frederking
William Frederking has an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois in Chicago and worked at Columbia College Chicago as a tenured faculty member in the Photography Department for over thirty years. He was Associate Dean for the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago under two different Deans, from 2008-2012, and 2015-2017.