Oceanides is a photographic project of underwater dance. I began this project together with a dancer from one of Toronto's ballet companies. It began in an informal and experimental way, with the idea of transposing the discipline of classical ballet to the weightlessness of the underwater world. We worked in a private pool over a two-year span using variations of lighting, film and choreography to produce some of the images in these galleries.

In writing an introduction to this work, I became aware that the impetus for this project was formed long before the first images emerged from the waters. Beauty is manifest everywhere–we are primed to recognize it in the sea of our perceptions, and what we call beautiful often seems to flow from something collective in human experience. Seeing beauty, we can respond in two ways: experientially–the delight in the glimmer of a higher order behind life; or analytically–the puzzle–what makes this so attractive? To the artist, perception and analysis are integral. Seeing sensitizes us to the common threads in sublime images, but reflection takes us beyond, to the why of beauty–the visual sweep of color, energy and form that fits our heart so immediately. To understand what we see empowers us to receive, reorder and remake nature-the eternal braid of all artistic response. I recall this perceptual-analytic reflex from my earliest memories and it followed me through my years of drawing and painting in art school. At the time, photography was a peripheral pursuit, its flatness and realism paled beside the dynamic organicism of paint. I remember a great exception, however, in some underwater figure photography I had seen by chance. Here, the documentary nature of photography seemed to make it the ideal medium. The strength of the camera is in how it splits time away from the physical world–the shutter falls and a passing scene becomes fixed in a perpetual now. In some ways, we perceive a picture of reality more deeply than the experience itself, so perhaps photography gives veracity to the idea that beauty infuses all life, if only just beyond our speed of perception. I suppose these nascent ideas motivated me, years later, to use underwater photography to explore the human figure. This project is the result of that experience, a process which unfolded over a few years.

So much of this project hinged on seemingly random meetings. The backdrop–a rare patch of warm, languid water in the frigid Canadian winter– I owe to a chance introduction. An architectural photographer I had met and worked with had told me of an unusual indoor pool built in his home many years ago. When I approached Richard to use the pool for underwater figure photography, my intent was only to generate some reference photos for drawings. He encouraged the project from the outset, however, and allowed me many hours of exploration time in the pool. To develop a reproducible photographic technique, I began some experimental sessions using friends as models. As the images began emerging, I understood how photography was the ideal contextual medium. The project took on its own rhythm over the next few months, evolving into purely photographic project. The model who graces these pages I owe to chance as well. Over the years, I had worked as a freelance designer and photographer for some of Toronto's dance companies, and this brought me in contact with Clea, a dancer in one of them. Having photographed a number of company rehearsals, she always shone out, a rare convergence of artistry, athleticism, and photogenic individuality. After broaching the idea of adapting her art-form to the underwater environment, she seized the idea as a creative challenge and our collaboration began.

The qualities Clea in her years on stage transposed beautifully to the rigors of the aquatic environment. Between the stage and a pool, a wide gulf exists, both physically and psychologically. In performance, so much of the dancer’s movements appear steeped in the illusion of weightlessness, and by mastery of space, position and timing she meshes seamlessly with other dancers. But underwater, that finesse is swept away. Gravity ceases its familiar pull, and a floating torpor erodes the body’s expressive ability. Even with eyes open, water blinds the dancer to the environment and separates her from the proprioceptive sense of where she is. She must now think through the mind’s eye of the audience. Such a leap from familiar training is a remarkable feat considering how, as the seconds tick by underwater, the mind whipsaws from higher creative powers to raw survival–the push back to the surface for air. Water gives the photographer a new set of challenges as well, and the whorling, random nature of it forces a hypervigilance in composing. You know that truth whenever the confident joy in having captured a thoughtfully planned moment dissipates in frustration at a lifeless printed image–and its diametric–the beautiful, accidental shot that you proudly feign credit for. Lighting, the flow of textiles and hair, facial expression, figure position in the frame and focal plane–all these variables flow independently, yet only as a unitary gestalt do they make the image. Working in such a protean environment becomes a coldly statistical process, and success on the battlefield requires an awareness of the variables as a set, as they turn on and enmesh. These image-moments, when all the elements coverge, are fleeting yet continual, and as the camera advances through film, the scene yields its treasures. Our photo sessions were usually built on refining promising ideas explored earlier and introducing new experiments with material, color and perspective variations. Often, to generate a new creative direction, we would begin with traditional figure positions and explore their potential in the flow and weightlessness of water. Despite our combined efforts, sheer serendipity often surpassed our best intentions, so many random shots and experiments came to be included in these galleries.

The pool we used was a sort of hybrid lap pool and its unusual length to width ratio formed a natural shooting bay. The older design and construction of it–a smooth marblite basin merging into a tiled perimeter ledge–provided an ideal minimalist backdrop for photography. The exceptional reflectivity of the pool’s interior amplified the abstracted light effects and generated an ever-changing visual foil to contrast the figure. The pool itself needed to be optimized for photography in many ways. The pH, alkalinity and free chlorine of the water was often wildly out of kilter, so daily testing and adjustment was needed to bring the chemistry back to earth. Neutrally balanced water was essential for extending underwater times with eyes open, and slowing the deterioration of textiles. The intensity of the lighting quickly revealed how dependent photo resolution was on the water’s clarity. Suspended dust and algae translated to noise and grain invading the darker tonal ranges of photographs. Thus, in the days preceding shoots, yet more chemicals needed to be added to the water to neutralize the fog of suspended dust and allow a few hours of pristine water clarity. The wardrobe for the project was built up slowly and involved many hunts through Toronto’s eclectic clothing districts. Most of the dresses were vintage, with solid colours and spare classic designs, and were resized and reinforced to survive repeated dives. The look of various materials underwater was highly distinct; chiffons and silk organzas struck the right transparent effects, while taffetas and linens produced opaque and reflective qualities. A few forgotten outfits from old ballet productions found an encore in the depths as well.

In an age of rampant digital gadget-lust, the technical setup for this project was refreshingly primitive and low-tech. Images were captured using either a Canon A-1 submersible camera (internally modified to bypass its DX coding), or an old war-torn Nikonos IVa. Two independent light sources were used: a boomed array on deck served to illuminate the interior of the pool and a point-source projection light was used to track the model’s movements underwater. When diffracted by the water’s surface, the temperature differential between the light sources combined and variegated into warm to cool colors over the figure in depth and distance. Both light sources were positioned to fall-off sharply into darkness to create the perception of large underwater space in what was, in fact, a rather confined area. I produced digital files by direct film scanning, a method which had many advantages over traditional photography. Scanning from negatives gleaned the most minute quanta of detail, while managing film grain, reducing visual noise and reconstructing color to account for the chromatic shifts particular to light passing through water. Working digitally also allowed me much creative latitude over the look and feel of images, a freedom approaching that of traditional painting. Color, tone, saturation, sharpness, grain became the compositional elements I could use to draw focus to a hemline or tendon, fade a bright wave back or manipulate positive and negative space by cropping or re-curving tonal values. The challenge in post-production of these images was enhancing the aesthetic potential latent in each image while retaining the essence of the photographic event.

More than any previous endeavor, photographing underwater gave me a freedom to explore the aesthetics of image making. John Ruskin, the art critic and aesthete of the Victorian Age wrote that “Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.” He was right on the mark with that simple observation over a century ago. Order emerging from chaos is the engine of beauty, and the wider the chasm, the more our eye is seduced. In our everyday surroundings we often seem as mere physicalities– massings of platonic primitives. Water and light, however, generate and imprint abstractions all over the figure in its surroundings. Beauty as structure shines though- we become exceptions in an indifferent universe. But chaos does more than contrast. The narrow strait between recognition and randomness frees us to project our imagination and associate our human sensibilities on the figure. The dancer’s understanding of her body and its permutational possibilities make her an ideal counterpoint to the molten tumult of the pool’s water and light. The years of physical, artistic and intellectual training are reflected in a mastery of the body as an instrument of expression. Intelligence, sensuousness and anima, impose a dimension on human form beyond its austere machine- beauty . For Clea, the pool’s glittering randomness was the epitome of Ruskin’s “proper foil,” and throughout our project I was stuck by how often ambiguity in nature is intrinsic to the perception of beauty. Reflecting back, the imagemaking of Oceanides gave me an opportunity to learn from a rare confluence of extremes and discover that in the natural world, humanness is the true why of beauty. –Greg Schilhab Toronto

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