Several years ago, Ben Franke, a photographer, became interested in parkour, a sport that has roots in training designed for French commandos and that involves running, jumping over objects and doing flips off surfaces.

The sport’s “freedom of movement” appealed to him, Mr. Franke said. But his interest was only casual until the Holi festival, an Indian celebration in which participants throw colored powder at one another, gave him an idea for a way to photograph parkour that would document the quickness integral to the sport.

Mr. Franke got to know some parkour practitioners and began accompanying them at night to various parts of New York City. Then, after coating them with flour, Mr. Franke used a flash to photograph the athletes as they jumped and ran. In the resulting images, the flour trails behind the athletes, appearing as a sort of mist or vapor. The pictures capture a split second in time while also providing a sense of the physical movements that preceded that instant and hinting at a trajectory to come.

“It shows the dynamics almost like video would,” Mr. Franke said, adding that his aim was to illustrate “the same sort of motion and energy” in a still image.