Yet when asked to pick a favourite photograph, Nokwanda was transformed.
He buys "at least" one photograph every week, he says, adding blithely, "But you can pick up a photograph for $600".
Next: glittery eyeshadow, in Hi-Def Cyan and Electric Eel. Harper picked up a photograph of Harris and Burtka in a pink sequinned frame.
"I'll be very careful with them," Rosa said, picking up a photograph of herself as a teen-age girl with Paco, smiling, beside her.
"Oh, is this her?" Chris picked up a photograph from the top of a chest of drawers, where it was arranged on a lace doily along with a tin alarm clock and a cut-glass dish full of buttons and paper clips, everything soft with dust.
He picked out a photograph labelled 'K' which is agreed to be Angus Sinclair.
Willie Houston, director of the African-American Museum, said he picked a selection of Mr. Harrison's photographs for an exhibition called "Climbing Jacob's Ladder," running through Aug. 24, documenting the area's black churches because "it was refreshing".
For each photograph, the dancer picks a setting, like the bustling city streets of Paris and Berlin, or a vibrant natural landscape, sets up his tripod, and leaps.
A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.
