Visual artists from Degas to Rick Guest have found inspiration in dancers’ forms, and most of the time their work capitalizes on the kinetic heft of graceful bodies. But the works in photographer Nir Arieli’s latest exhibit at New York’s Daniel Cooney Fine Art gallery, Flocks, capture dancers at moments of perfect stillness. Arieli photographed contemporary dance companies in intimate, resting poses in a search to find “what remains in the dancers’ bodies when the dance stops.”

“My ultimate guideline and rule is to never look for something perfect, but mix my natural attraction to beauty with some complexity,” Arieli tells The Creators Project. “In Flocks there is what I’d like to think as an undercurrent of sex and death, the images are very quiet but there is a sense of tragedy. Nevertheless, there is also a sense of intimacy, which is something I consider to be the root and heart of my work.”

Each company took a different approach to the assignment, says Arieli. “Each group in this project has a different style of movement, different heritage, dancers from different nationalities and races.The task I gave them was the same, yet each company had a different way to go about it,” he writes. “The dancers started to arrange their bodies, offered and requested support from each other. Cedar Lake for example wanted to pile up high—it worked out beautifully with the 45 degrees skylight in their Chelsea studio… and they offered backs and shoulders to support each other.”

The easy familiarity with which the dancers Arieli photographed interlocked could only be achieved by people who know their own bodies and each others’ intimately. While no full form can be discerned in the mazes of limbs and faces, the works are a celebration of the body in fragment—a veined hand, a lithe leg. “Nir’s images are an important addition to dance photography as they picture the dancers performing without movement,” Daniel Cooney tells The Creators Project. “They maintain the photographer’s concerns of beauty but have a dark undercurrent throughout.”

To find more of Nir Arieli’s work, click here.

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