DANCE INK PHOTOGRAPHS.<i> Edited by J. Abbott Miller and Patsy Tarr</i> .<i> Essays by Nancy Dalva</i> . <i> Chronicle Books: 189 pp., $35 paper</i>

No art form has a more complicated relationship with the photographic image than dance. Photography is about making the evanescent indelible. Dance is about making the ubiquitous, the body, evanescent. Yet the two art forms share a curious obsession with formalizing the human body. In dance, the body is a medium of choreographic expression, a flesh and muscle canvas for expressive display. Photography also transforms people, rendering them as visual objects. Dancers, when photographed, are thus framed twice: First they are the medium of the dance maker, a remnant of his invention, and then they are objects in the photographer’s visual design.

This layering gets more complex in “Dance Ink Photographs.” A compendium of photographs culled from the sumptuous quarterly journal Dance Ink, the book is a stark black-and-white homage to several dozen avant-garde dancers and performance artists. During its short life from 1990 to ‘96, Dance Ink was a visually lavish and well-paying publication privately funded by Patsy Tarr, a member of the board of directors of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and a supporter of young choreographers and dancers. These photographs commemorate late 20th century dancers and dance photographers along with the sensibility of Tarr, who matched dancers and photographers in commissioned shoots. The tone of the book, reinforced by Nancy Dalva’s five eulogistic essays on Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp, is one of awe for the rich physicality of dance and the uncensored beauty of the dancing body.

It is exceedingly difficult to be a collector of dances or dancers, not just because the art doesn’t stay still or last but because every attempt at documentation is always incomplete. With photographs, you don’t get the whole dance, you get a moment of it or several moments of it, but you never get the whole, real, temporal thing. “Dance Ink Photographs” circumvents this lacuna by making dancers, not actual dances, its subject. Each of the 200 photographs is curiously identified only by the dancer’s name and then, in smaller type, by the photographer’s. No company affiliation, no choreographer, no dance title, intervenes in this reverential act between the photographer’s eye and the body honed by dance. Yet in every dancing body, we see remnants of the kind of movement that shaped it. Elizabeth Streb, for example, tautly muscled and stern-faced, suspended in a harness, her limbs spread-eagled, looks like the kind of tough risk-taker that her choreography demands.

Much like a smart review of a good performance, the memorability of Dance Ink as a magazine lay in the dialogue it initiated between provocative images and the reflective texts of some of the most interesting New York dance writers, such as Joan Acocella, Mindy Aloff and Tobi Tobias. Many of their essays dealt with the perceptual challenges of dance photography. It was a fascinating exercise to see dance critics who had spent their lives in front of moving images pondering the exquisite stillness of the dance photograph. Unencumbered by advertisements or censorious advertisers, Dance Ink did whatever it wanted graphically. Many of these daring images that would have challenged the mainstream--such as full-page sensuous portraits of choreographer Stephen Petronio, topless in a fur-lined room, or a snarling image of performance artist Diamanda Galas sporting tight leather apparel and tattooed fingers--are reprinted in this book. The more risque images include those of John Kelly, who transforms himself with makeup, costumes and elaborate sets into a fey Mona Lisa and Parisian aerialist, and Lance Gries, who springs upward with outstretched arm and upraised leg, nude except for black boots.

This tension between adoration and the inevitable distortion dance photography involves is a constant throughout the book. Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” commented on this obsessive need of contemporary man to bring objects closer and thus to negate their unique, ephemeral quality. Miller and Tarr’s book indirectly acknowledges that tension, revealing how photographs are a durable and accessible artifact of dance and, at the same time, its violation.

Of the 18 photographers represented in “Dance Ink Photographs,” the one who most comfortably works in the zone between the stage and life is Annie Leibovitz, whose photographs seem not to have happened just before or after an action, but right in the midst of something still ongoing. They bristle with clarity and spontaneous vibrancy. My favorite in this collection is Leibovitz’s stunning photo of New York City Ballet dancer Darci Kistler seated on the lap of Peter Martins, the ballet’s artistic director and Kistler’s husband. The photo tells several stories at once. Doll-like Kistler seems to pose weightless on Martins’ lap, her legs disappearing into a huge fluff of white tulle skirt, her hands gracefully limp, her waist-length hair cascading down her back and her bare neck and shoulders arching upward as her bosom is defined by a row of soft satin roses at the border of her gown. While Kistler gazes upward, all pliancy and vulnerability, Martins faces the camera sternly, his hands about Kistler’s waist as he sits in a chair, his gaze challenging and possessive. With his jacket resting on the back of his chair and his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, he seems caught in an intimate action both aesthetic and sexual, which is the essence of dance.

This quality is also evident in photos by Twyla Tharp’s son, Jesse Huot, of Tharp, sleek and gray-haired, in rehearsal. It is this promise and this revelation that is in the finest dance photography. For dancer and photographer to get into this zone is a fleeting and transitory achievement. “Dance Ink Photographs” reminds us how the finest dance photographs can be messages of that journey.