In the recent Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy, one of my favourite rooms was the one that set Degas's obsession with the dancing body in context with the photography of the period. It featured the work of Eadweard Muybridge, whose meticulous stop-motion technique tried to capture the dynamics and line of the moving body. And, much less familiarly, the work of François Willème, a French photographer whose "photo-sculptures" pioneered a concept of three-dimensional photography by placing his sitters, or subjects, inside a ring of 24 cameras.
Processing two dozen simultaneous photographs into a single image was a laborious one, which was why the concept of photo-sculpture didn't really catch on. But it's an idea that's been taken up by the photographer Ryan Enn Hughes who, with all the fabulous trickery of new technology, has engineered the 360 degree project, which makes movement portraits of two groups of dancers, members of Northbuck Krump crew, and students at the National Ballet School of Canada.
His basic premise is similar to Willème's. Hughes places his dancer inside a circle of 48 cameras, which are networked up to take a simultaneous image of what he calls a "peak" moment of action – a jump, an arabesque, a slide.
The edited product is described by Hughes as a "crossroads of photography and motion picture" – a kind of animated slideshow in which the individual images are stylised, scrunched and teased to form their own dance. What Hughes is after, and what would have made his project so fascinating to Degas, is not a mere mimicry of movement. Any conventional video could do that. Rather he captures a sense of intensity and immediacy, the physicality of the moment.
In the Krump video, one of the most successful effects is the Tasered freneticism that Hughes achieves by freeze-framing and condensing, so that the energy flashes, burns, scratches and bumps through the sequence. In the ballet video, he allows the dancer to flicker impossibly mid-jeté, or wheel around slowly in an inhumanly off-balanced pirouette. When more than one dancer is in frame, they are sometimes glued together, their individual energies fused.
It's an early experiment. But what I like most about the 360 degree project is the lack of idealisation. In contrast to the glossy, airbrushed perfection to which much dance photography and film aspires, there's a gritty sense of effort. However stylised the imagery, some of it gets right under the skin of the movement. It's a 21st century variant of the very last drawings that Degas ever made of dancers – lightening scribbled sketches that blurred together three or four poses in one. A vivid trace, not an immaculate record.
