About two and a half hours northeast of New York City, on a mountain in the Berkshires, lies Jacob’s Pillow. And on the grounds of this rustic family farm-turned-international dance festival, over seventy photographs hang in an 18th-century barn gifted to a Hollywood dancer. In one of them, African-American modern dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey rocks backwards in a jazzy hinge. A few feet away, German neo-expressionist dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch looks boldly up at her partner. Across the room, French-American ballet dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq looks down over their elegantly clasped hands.

“One of the remarkable things about this exhibition is that the images are all in color,” Norton Owen, curator of “John Lindquist: As of Today” and director of historic preservation at the Pillow, told me when I arrived in Becket, Massachusetts. That may not sound remarkable, but it’s worth remembering that the photographs in the exhibition date from the 1930s to the 1970s. Ailey’s return was in 1959, Bausch’s peak was in 1968, and Le Clercq’s gaze fell in 1951. And yet, you look at these photographs as if they were taken yesterday. Even though most of the dance artists in the photographs are no longer with us, they feel present, alive, and well in Blake’s Barn.

This incredible journey through time is possible thanks to a series of fortunate circumstances. First, John Lindquist, born in 1890, used Kodachrome film—a very stable color film—during his time as the Pillow’s staff photographer from 1938 until his death in 1980. Second, Lindquist’s protégé Stephen Driscoll donated Lindquist’s 35mm Kodachrome slides (over 13,000 in total, plus 7,500 black-and-white photographs, 2,800 contact sheets and negatives, and 16mm film) to the Harvard Theater Collection at the university’s Houghton Library. Then the Houghton Library decided to digitize thousands of the John Lindquist Collection’s images to make them available to the public. And finally, Owen—who first met Lindquist and Driscoll in 1976 when he was a student at the Pillow—was motivated to leaf through thousands of these digitized images.

Like this exhibition, Jacob’s Pillow was always a collaboration, a coming together of the right people at the right time. In 1931, dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn bought the farm as a retreat for artists. In 1933, he began putting on performances with his newly formed company, Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. When many of the dancers were drafted into the military in 1940, Shawn disbanded the company and fell deeply into debt. Many came to his and Pillow’s aid, and a committee of dancers and local enthusiasts raised enough money to buy the property from Shawn and build the first theater in America designed specifically for dance. The country’s longest-running international dance festival has flourished ever since, and in 2003 the site was designated a National Historic Landmark for its significance to American culture and history.

Lindquist was a 48-year-old cashier at Filene’s department store and amateur photographer when he discovered the Pillow. He was driving with friends on Route 20 from Tanglewood back to Boston when he saw a sign for a performance by Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. According to the documentary John Lindquist Photographer of Dance starting in 1980, Lindquist would point to the sign and say, “Take me there!” He took a few photos during the show, developed them, and showed them to Shawn, who named Lindquist the Pillow’s first official photographer. Lindquist spent 42 summers at the Pillow, photographing thousands of the world’s most famous and innovative dance artists.

This isn’t the first exhibition of Lindquist’s work that Owen has curated. In 1997, he put together a retrospective for the festival’s 65th anniversary, choosing a photograph for each summer Lindquist was there. This time, Owen wanted to do things differently — he didn’t want to worry about chronology or fame. This time, he was more concerned with the quality of the image itself than the person in it. Don’t get me wrong, the walls of Blake’s Barn are full of stars. You can see the greats in all their glory, but you’ll also come across names and faces you’ve never seen before. “I wanted visitors to find people they’ve never heard of,” Owen said. “Who didn’t make it into the history books, and see that they still left their mark here.”

One of my favorite photos in the exhibition falls into this category. It is untitled, only labeled Charles Tate, 1941. I did not know the name and could not find out much about this dancer, except that he performed in Radha with Ruth St. Denis (Ted Shawn’s ex-wife), but the image is exquisite: a man hovers over the rock that gave the Pillow its name, with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back, his feet crossed and his chest wide open. Another photo that is more striking for its composition than its subject is Portrait of a ballerinawith Mia Slavenska, the Croatian-American soloist with the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, performing a pas de chat in a long tutu in 1952. The image is eerie because the dancer’s legs are tucked up beneath her, making it look as if she is floating legless in the air against a cornflower-blue sky.

It should be noted that most of the photos in the exhibition were taken outdoors. Lindquist preferred the bright sunlight for his posed photoshoots, and Owen decided to limit his selection to the photos taken outdoors, as they were less grainy than those taken in the darkened cinema.

Several photographs are characterized by the use of colors, which, as Owen emphasized, make them not only vibrant but also “remarkably present.” Todd Bolender’s “At the Still Point” stands out because of Emily Frankel’s orange dress, which appears white in the video footage of the 1955 performance available on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. Owen said that even those who know the dance well and have performed it since then were amazed by this detail. The rosy hue of dancer Grant Mouradoff’s costume in Michel Fokines The Spirit of the Rosetaken in 1943, is stunning, as is the colorful skirt worn by Tina Ramirez, founder of Ballet Hispánico, in 1948, and the buttercup yellow of ballroom dancer Vanya’s dress in 1952.

All of the photographs in the exhibition are prints from the newly digitized archives, except for one, a color print from Driscoll’s private collection: “Air Section” from Dance of the Ages with Ted Shawn and his “Men Dancers” from 1938. The picture is worth seeing not only because it is a beautiful photo with great historical significance, but also because the comparison of the color quality with the newer prints is revealing.

As for the layout of the exhibition, it is chronological but incredibly choreographed. One wall has male solos, another has female solos, another has trios and ensembles, and finally duets. In one corner, video footage is looped alongside the photographs, and about seventy other images are shown. In this way, the walls and images speak to each other and interact. “You can see a single photograph differently because of its neighbors,” explained Owen. “Because of its context.”

The response to the exhibition has been brilliant so far and Owen is delighted that it is appealing to so many, even those who don’t consider themselves “dance people”. He said: “That’s part of what we want to do with an exhibition: to welcome more people. To make them say, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting. I’d like to see more’, or to kind of open something up for them or give them a connection point. And that’s what these images do. There are so many connection points. If ten people come in, they’ll connect ten different images and that to me is a sign of success.”

“John Lindquist: As of Today” ends on August 25, but can be viewed by appointment throughout the winter.