Laura Mcluskey
Alyssa Allen, from 'Blue Above', 2018
The photograph offers what life rarely does: evidence that transcendence is achievable, even if only for an instant. Alyssa Allen has propelled herself into a space where the usual rules don't apply. Not floating, not falling, held. The emotional forces that weigh on us, the physical forces that bind us to earth, both suspended simultaneously. This is what release looks like: the body at maximum extension, weight made invisible, the self divorced from everything that grounds it.
Allen is suspended mid-flight, frozen at the apex of her leap. McCluskey has captured the exact instant between ascent and descent, the moment when the body transcends the forces that bind it. Allen soars higher than the palm trees below, her body fully extended against limitless blue sky. Her eyes are cast upward, toward what's above rather than what's below. There's no hint of effort, only the aftermath of release.
McCluskey's Blue Above project asked contemporary dancers in suburban Los Angeles to physically interpret their own anxiety and unrest through improvised movement. But what McCluskey has photographed here isn't anxiety, it's escape from it. The leap as liberation, the body achieving what the mind struggles to: complete separation from weight, from ground, from the forces that hold us down. This is possibility made physical. For this brief, impossible moment, Allen exists beyond gravity, beyond limitation, suspended in pure potential.
Below Allen, the ground is visible, cast in deep shadow. Palm trees stand to the left of the frame. She has risen above the shadowy earth, occupying the limitless blue above it. The composition splits between darkness below and light above, between weight and weightlessness. Allen dominates the upper frame despite being small within it, proof that transcendence doesn't require scale, only commitment to the leap. She exists in the space between launch and landing where possibility is infinite because consequence hasn't arrived yet. The shadow waits below but cannot reach her.
Dance freezes what cannot be held. The body moves through positions that exist for fractions of seconds: moments of perfect extension, perfect balance, perfect flight. McCluskey captures the instant when Allen achieves complete escape: from anxiety, from gravity, from the ground that waits below. The forces that launched her and the forces that will reclaim her are both suspended. What remains is the photograph's promise: that we can, even briefly, transcend what binds us. The leap is possible. The blue above is reachable. And for one frozen moment, the body proves it.
Laura McCluskey is a London-based photographer working in fashion, portrait, and documentary photography. Her first book Blue Above (2019, Guest Editions) explores dance, emotion, and physical expression through improvised movement photographed in suburban Los Angeles.
More on McCluskey: lauramccluskey.com
