There May Come a Moment

This fusion of close observation of the physical world, a passionate specificity, and the heart moved to wonder. Each time passing through the liquid mirror, which so conceals what lies below, the artist quite clear he’s delivering himself into the power of something greater than the self, that only by its grace can he (hope to) return.

That and all that follow are taken from the introduction, written by Thomas Farber, to the book, Through a Liquid Mirror: Photographs of Wayne Levin (1997).

Levin’s photographs and the text I will be quoting are about photography in the ocean. I would like the references to water and the ocean in the quotes to be considered as metaphorical, not literal. Metaphorical to what? You’ll figure it out. [Please note that the ellipses within the text are in the original. Ellipses at the beginning of a section have been added by me to indicate a break from one quote to another.]

… if, since childhood you’ve been fascinated by seeing the world through the viewfinder of a camera, the way things appear at the edge of the frame, pass across it, then vanish . . . and if as an adult you photograph, say, window displays or dioramas, shooting through the glass, making images that superimpose that larger world the windows reflect onto the “make-believe” world of the display — itself intended to simulate the “real” . . . and if you think of glass as a former liquid and know that water is often “glassy” . .. . and/or, if as a young artist you’re working at “street photography,” the gist of which is that the photographer, visually inconspicuous in the midst of life, reacts — fast! — to a moment, seeking to catch events rather than objects . . . the photographer then culling those few exposures compelling in composition or in content — which, ideally, transcend what the photographer knew or intended . . . Given all this, there may come a moment when, long since in love with surf, you purchase an underwater camera and head out with mask and fins into the turbulence and tumult of breaking waves.

… We come from the ocean, they tell us. May, some day, return. Live, like cetaceans, between two worlds. Are “merely highly advanced fishes,” ichthyologist/paleontologist John A. Long argues in The Rise of Fishes. Not surprisingly, the artist is affected, transformed, by his time in the medium in which he works. Though moved by reef animals, the dazzling array of colors and strategies of the miniature, it’s the larger marine creatures which come to him to seem the gods or spirits of their realm. Feeling this as he yet again swims, paddles, or submerges in search of them, waits for them in the broiling sun. This fusion of close observation of the physical world, a passionate specificity, and the heart moved to wonder. Each time passing through the liquid mirror, which so conceals what lies below, the artist quite clear he’s delivering himself into the power of something greater than the self, that only by its grace can he (hope to) return.

… Photographers and water: both of them into magic, conjurers of reflection, refraction. Surely a bond. Then too, there’s the ocean’s siren song; it’s a twice-told tale that one must heed its call. Think of mermaids, among other seductions; or Odysseus, for years still voyaging, allegedly always in order to return home; or the great Polynesian navigators, perhaps driven into the deep blue to build a new life, or with a passion for exploring, or led on by the irresistible, evanescent but recurring tracks of migrating birds. It may also be true, however, connected to the ocean for whatever nexus of reasons, that long since the photographer has no more choice than any artist possessing — or possessed by — so insatiable a hunger.

… Over and again, at sea level or at several atmospheres below, over and again I’ve seen this photographer leave my field of vision — appear, so to speak, in the viewfinder of my eyes at the edge of the frame, pass across it, and vanish. The photographer free diving, wake of bubbles trailing from his fins, at a range of fifty or seventy-five feet merging into the murk. Or, in his kayak, scanning the horizon, paddling away from shore though day’s waning, toward the sunset and so beyond the capacity to make him out, until he’s no more than a filament or a memory in one’s eye. This insatiable artist surely as difficult to apprehend as the almost-mirages he’s for so many years so ardently pursued.

This book, Through a Liquid Mirror: Photographs of Wayne Levin, is wonderful. Very highly recommended if you are interested in buying such. To see Wayne Levin’s photography, please visit his site. I love his stuff.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/