riotcolorphoto

Before the arenas there were portraits. People sat very still in front of the camera, and the light did most of the work. I learned to wait for it.

Then a client who had spent years inside aesthetic group gymnastics looked through the pictures and said something simple. You should come to a competition.

So I went. I did not understand what I was seeing. The music started, a body moved faster than my eye could follow. I pressed the shutter where it felt right. People liked the pictures, and they told me so.

That should have been the end of the story. It was the beginning of the problem. Good was not enough once I knew how much I was missing.

So I learned the Code of Points, until I could read a routine the way a judge reads it: the split at the top of a leap, the half second where the shape is right and the half second after it, when it is already gone. That half second is the photograph.

I am also a musician, a music teacher and an audio engineer. I hear a routine before I see it. Perhaps that is why I never slow one down.

Six seasons later, I work carpet-side, mostly in Estonia. Eight or so competitions a season, and each one a chapter.

There are two ends to it, and riotcolorphoto is there at both: before the season, when the routine is still only music, and on the day it is performed.

Before the season

I make the music. A mix is cut on the phrase, timed to the Code and shaped around how she moves, not only shortened to fit. The connection between music and movement is judged, and it begins in the edit. Gymnasts who know the work come back each season for a new one.

On competition day

I keep what she made of it. I find her in the start list and I am in position when the music starts. Then, frame by frame, I choose the moment she looks like herself on her best day.

After

Files arrive when I said they would: the Folio within a week, the Cut within two, or the same evening with express. Every message is answered by me.

Most of the work is in what I leave out. These are the things I have stopped doing, or never started, and the reasons are the whole of the method.

What remains is the routine, as it happened.

Here a competition is called a chapter. Chapters are counted within the season, and the season follows the sport. It opens with the first competition of the autumn and closes with the last one before summer. Then the carpets are rolled up, the arenas go quiet, and the house waits for the next autumn.

From each chapter, a family receives two things, and both have names. The Folio is the edited set of photographs from one routine. The Cut is the routine as film, at the speed it was performed.

Read in order, the chapters become an archive, and gymnasts grow up inside it. The frames are kept on Instagram, at @riotcolor.photo.