Drawing upon the devotional traditions and psychological intensity of Francisco de Goya, Alexander James Hamilton creates meticulously staged underwater tableaux that exist between corporeal presence and spectral absence. Submerging subjects within highly purified water, Hamilton constructs each work physically in-camera, sculpting light through gestures made across the water’s surface tension to produce unique analogue film plates.
Garments drift as though suspended beyond gravity while liquid distortion and controlled chiaroscuro reorganise the body into something simultaneously present and unstable. The works do not recreate historical painting but use water as an active medium for physical construction, where light, liquid and duration determine the final image.
Captured entirely on 8×10 analogue film plates without post-production, the series approaches photography as a physical event rather than an act of representation. Water becomes both optical device and active material, and the resulting works occupy an unstable territory between photography, sculpture and apparition.
As Andrei Tolstoy, Russian Academic and Professor of Arts, observed:
¨ The photograph is the only existing record of a far bigger conceptual process that is produced through his complete dedication to a renaissance studio practice. ’
