OK, I know what you're going to say after you read this story: the first entry in my Joy of Digital Photography Blog is about a traditional (i.e. film) photography project. In fact, you'll find that the very absence of anything digital is a large part of the story. With that said...
Every once in a while something really great happens to someone that really deserves it and who has waited a really long time for it to happen. And that is exactly the case with the upcoming publication of Brian Oglesbee's exquisite new book Aquatique (Insight Editions, September 25, 2007). The book is going to be a monograph featuring more than 100 of Brian's extraordinary underwater figure studies, plus detail shots of some photos that let you delve into an otherwise hidden level of his images. I wrote a feature on Brian for the March/April edition of American Photo magazine (the issue that is currently on the stands).
The photos in Aquatique are almost impossible to describe: they're beautiful, mystical, enchanting and they are downright confounding. The images depict human figures that appear at once to be floating above, hovering beneath or, most often, piercing through a surface of water that shifts from the look of a realistic woodland pond to that of a shimmering illusion. Many of these figure studies include a secondary visual layer of bubbles that, when viewed in extreme close-up (these are the detail shots in the book) reveal repititioins and distortions of the main subject that will have you pondering not only the logistics of how such shots were made, but the very nature of water and reflections and bubbles themselves.
For the time being, at least, Brian is being very selective in how much he reveals about how the photos were created, but there is one thing that is an absolute certainty: these photographs were all made in front of the lens and there is not a single pixel of digital slight-of-hand at work. In fact, all of the photos were shot in 4x5 using Polaroid P/N film (it creates both a print and a high-quality negative simultaneously).
