About Ari Denison

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I have been working in the dance community for the last seven years. In this time I have been privileged to work with large and small dance companies based in Oregon, California, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New York and Tennessee. I have helped these groups as well as many individual dancers and choreographers promote themselves with strong images representing the best of their creativity and talent.

In 2010, when I was finishing up Studio Sessions, I started to take a good long look at what I had accomplished and where I wanted to go next. I came to realize that my goal in photography had, until that point, been to capture and express beauty in an almost purely formal manner. This means that I've been ultimately concerned with the traditional compositional elements of imagemaking; line, texture, shape, color and all of that.

Anyway, I was getting more assignments and being asked to bring more creative input to the table and I've never felt very up to that challenge. Sure, I could tackle all sorts of technical demands, but my conceptual creativity was weak in comparison.

I'm not the kind of guy who can sit still when he realizes that something needs to be fixed, or in this case, brought up to par with my other skills. But how?

I moved in late 2010 and then took most of 2011 to figure this out. I attended an advanced intensive in Montana that did little more than tell me what kind of training I didn't need. I applied for MFA programs at a couple of different schools. All I really figured out in 2011 was that I needed to work with a community of artists. When I work in a vacuum I miss out on all the fun idea stuff that comes from being around other artists. The ideas, the critiques, the open atmosphere, the shop-talking, all of it is really good for the creative spirit. Whether it was formally set up in an MFA program or loosely organized within my local Memphis community didn't matter. Being around both is probably best, but really, just be around artists. And so, that's where I am. I'm already charged with ideas and plans. Now it's just a matter of making the time and money to put them all into action.