Dancers Take New York

Photographer Jordan Matter has an amazingly fun series called Dancers Among Us, which is exactly what it sounds like: dancers amongst familiar backdrops in New York City. He began the ongoing project a year ago, which features members of the Paul Taylor and Martha Graham Dance Companies, as well as settings like Yankee Stadium and the New York Public Library. And believe it or not, there were no tricks or trampolines used in capturing these images.

We asked Matter what kind of reactions he gets when shooting these scenarios, and he told us: "I spent seven years photographing topless women in the streets of NYC for my book, Uncovered, so I assumed I'd seen every type of startled reaction imaginable. But the Dancers Among Us series took those reactions to an entirely new level. People are genuinely stunned by the dancer's athleticism. One man in the subway was so transfixed by watching a dancer continuously jump high into the air and hold a running pose that he missed his train, cursed to the heavens, and ran outside to catch a cab." [via Kottke]