Blue Water

Blue Water, or the deep ocean, is a formless landscape. Its impermanent shape is formed by wind and gravity. Flowing over rocks or beating against the shore water forms a landscape that is both fluid and constant. 

Photographing the movements of the Atlantic Ocean today still renders images, not unlike those of Gustave Le Gray’s albumen prints of the French coast a hundred and sixty years ago. Water covers the land like flesh for the camera to peal away. A cataract is in constant motion but with photography’s unique rendering of reality, a long exposure blurs the water into a consistent shape. Niagara Falls has a sublime consistency allowing it to be photographed in stereo with a single camera. 

A hundred year ago, the desire of pictoralism was to use a chemical-mechanical process to interpret the world with the subjectivity of human perception. The seemingly solid earth that is the subject of a traditional landscape is in fact continually changing under the influence of the elements, but it is at a temporal scale that is more often incomprehensible to us. The means of illumination in art or science may be a matter of proportion, art being a struggle to describe the world with a scale as close to human as possible while the precise definitions of science depict the world from a perspective as far from human as can still be understood. 

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