WATER AS A LENS

Water as an optical instrument

For four decades, water has been the central material through which my photographic practice has developed, acting as subject, working medium and optical instrument.

A body of water is an unstable optical instrument. Its surface bends and redirects light continuously, and because that surface moves, its focal behaviour changes from one second to the next in ways a glass lens never does. Depth, angle, temperature and the smallest disturbance in surface tension all alter where light gathers into caustics above, how it distorts light and form below, where it scatters, and what becomes visible beneath it. Each of these is a function of time. This instability is the working material of the practice: a lens with its own duration, its own agency, its own moment of resolution. The photograph that results is built directly around this instrument.

Archytas, from the series Oil + Water, dated 2014–2022.

Jupiter, from Goya reborn in water
unique analogue photograph
90 × 120 cm
35 ⅜ × 47 ¼ inches
dated 2025

Constructing the conditions

Each image begins as an apparatus, assembled before any exposure is considered. Water tanks hold a controlled volume at a controlled temperature, and filtration systems maintain the laboratory stasis the work requires before it can begin.

Subjects range from organic material, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, foxes, flowing fabrics and handmade objects, to the human form. All are staged within the water and shrouded in complete darkness, and the space around the tank is itself precisely controlled. In the figurative works, models worked within the tank on projects such as A Beautiful Announcement of Death, 2012, and Rastvorennaya Pechal, 2014. Light is directed at precise angles, its intensity and duration controlled. The slightest deviation in the surface tension of the water can have profound consequences. The large-format camera and the transparency film impart their own optical properties, working in series with the dynamic role of the water.

Each element functions in relation to the others: the body of water and its capacity to hold or lose movement; the subject's position in relation to the precise lighting, which determines how refracted and reflected light reaches it; the angle of illumination, which determines how caustics and refraction move across the surface and through the water. The camera receives whatever the system, taken together, produces at the instant of exposure. The positive film plates play their own precise function within it. With only six stops of exposure latitude, the film becomes paramount in the painterly execution of the final exposure.

It is at this moment that the work is labelled photography. A five-hundredth of a second carries from a year of planning: wardrobe and prop fabrication, the natural propagation of flowers and butterflies within the studio, and the preparation of the tank itself. To name only that fraction of a second is to set aside the scope of each plate's making. Professor Andrei Tolstoy, Professor of Arts and President of AICA Russia, described the result as follows: “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.” [12]

Dark Vat, Siberia, dated 2019.

Building the system is only the first part of the work. Once the studio or field location is prepared, and water, light and subject are in place, the more demanding task begins: watching how they behave together, and recognising the moment at which their combined behaviour becomes closure. Energy in the water can take a long time to settle, or it can hold a particular geometry for a fraction of that time before dissolving into something else entirely. I spend long periods simply observing this, waiting to see what resolutions may be possible, always interacting with the surface tension: principally with my hands, or with a brush; palette knives are a particular favourite; sometimes with purpose-built strange apparatus. The intention is to create specific wave interventions, shaping the scene in ways not yet attempted, in search of a new equilibrium.

Most of what the water does in these intervals is unusable: too diffuse, too chaotic, too close to what has already been made; a repetition is not tolerated given the cost of each exposure. The work lies in recognising the interval where instability becomes structure, where movement briefly organises itself into something unrepeatable, with the camera ready at the point that recognition occurs. This is closer to sustained observation within a constructed experiment than to conventional composition. The artist builds the conditions under which an image becomes possible, then attends closely enough to recognise it when it resolves.

Understood this way the studio becomes an extended apparatus, and so do I: tank, light, subject, camera and the person watching, working as a single instrument.

The only strange thing about my practice is that I only want to produce these kinds of works, and only this way. It can be done in other ways, through darkroom or digital manipulation of some kind, but it would not be the same, and that does not appeal to me. I have no desire to manipulate anything other than these liquid mechanics. If I used other methods, tricks would occur to me and I would be able to repeat them endlessly. To me that would be horrific, and the work undeserving. [11, 14]

The scene is there, created underwater. Now I want to see the places it will go, new and unrepeatable. It appeals to me to be able to handle the work like this, not knowing what is coming.

To effect some form of post production after these complex intersections are recorded would to me be like pouring concrete down a water well. Devouring everything of value in the event recorded.

Light becomes structure

“I do not light my subjects. I light water.” [13]

Under the right conditions, a disturbed water surface concentrates light into caustics: bright, moving bands and fields produced as light is reflected or refracted by a changing liquid boundary. [A] Painters have long observed caustics as incidental detail, light caught in a glass of wine dancing in a brigade of light across the table it stands on. Willem Claesz Heda painted precisely this. [8] My practice makes the caustic itself one of the mechanisms through which a subject becomes visible. Remove the water, and a figure is simply lit. Introduce it, and the figure is disclosed, its form written by a surface, a lens that is itself in motion.

Willem Claesz Heda, Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware (1635).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Caravaggio arrived at a related recognition four centuries earlier, by entirely different means. In The Taking of Christ the figures are compressed into a narrow band of visibility. The National Gallery of Ireland records that the scene is lit by the moon, and that the lantern held within the composition is an ineffective source of illumination. [1] The effective light lies outside the depicted lamp. Illumination has been organised for the needs of the image rather than those of the room.

Caravaggio resolves the behaviour of light within the painted image, through pigment, ground and tonal relation. My practice relocates part of that construction into the physical conditions preceding the photograph. Light is acted upon before it reaches the film. The historical problem remains recognisable. The site at which it is resolved has changed.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, (1602).
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Isis Bound is where this recognition returns fully to my own practice. [9] Period flowers sit in a body of black water whose moving surface redirects illumination before it reaches the film. The luminosity of the photograph is produced within that optical encounter. Light is concentrated, scattered and redirected by a surface in continuous motion above the scene, before the shutter closes. Imagine painting The Taking of Christ, every pigment and every brushstroke, in a single instant, with every colour still wet and movable; then being able to work into that surface using water to paint the subject in light, using a hand or with a brush, literally painting in light. Form is not applied. It emerges.

Isis Bound, 2011, from the series Vanitas, (dated 2008–Ongoing).

Forms produced by physical forces

The method extends across the practice as a continuous line of enquiry. In the Vanitas series, water governs how flowers, fabric and glass each receive and return light, each material producing a distinct optical signature within the same physical system: petals scatter differently from silk, glass differently again, and the water reconciles them all within a single exposure.

In the Oil + Water series, (2014–2022), the apparatus moved beyond the studio into the Siberian winter. River water and crude oil drawn from the exact same location were brought together in large ossuaries, in temporary research facilities set up directly onto the frozen river ice, working in isolation deep within the remote forest, at temperatures beyond −50°C. Phase change, viscosity, scale, temperature and duration all combined to determine what could occur. Temperature, pressure and material behaviour were now governed by the environment, in a field experiment in which phase transition and its associated enthalpy of fusion became active material conditions. [7] My role shifted from constructing a closed studio system to entering a system already in motion, and recognising the brief point at which instability resolved into visible form. I was intervening in a process I did not govern, and the results were not ones I could ever have predicted.

Oil + Water, Kama River, Siberia, dated 2019.
57.8928°N 56.7838°E

Plate 0162, from Cymatic Water + Light (2026).
unique analogue photograph
120 × 180 cm
47 ¼ × 70 ⅞ inches

In Cymatic Water + Light (dated 2022–Ongoing), resonance takes the surface's function further still, organising it through frequency and the pure physics of standing waves so that the resulting caustic field becomes a visible record of resonance. [B] Sound, translated into a specific frequency and transmitted into the water, produces intricate forms. Ernst Chladni made vibration visible in 1787 by scattering sand across resonating plates. [6] Faraday described the behaviour of particles upon vibrating surfaces, and the standing waves that now carry his name, in 1831. [5] The patterns that emerge here hold a stable geometry for as long as the frequency is sustained: geometry the water would not produce under natural conditions, in stillness, or under uncontrolled intervention. The forms take on the semblance of electricity within functioning organic circuitry, and appear to be communicating. The photograph records the structure of a physical law that is otherwise unseen.

Across all three, the same working principle holds. [C] A set of physical conditions is established. The system is activated. The photograph that results is a consequence of that activation.

Plate 0152, 2022, from the series Cymatic Water + Light, (2022–Ongoing).

The photograph as event

This is the proposition the method has been building toward: a photograph as the material consequence of something that occurred.

Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished the index through its causal, physical connection to an event or object. Photography became a defining example because the image is produced through an actual encounter with light. [2] André Bazin located photography's distinctive force in the automatic formation of the image through that action of light. [3] Rosalind Krauss carried the argument into the twentieth century, using the index to understand photography as trace. [4]

What water adds to this lineage is a literal demonstration of an established idea. [10] The causal relationship Peirce, Bazin and Krauss each describe becomes, in this practice, an event with a beginning and an end: light enters a system, the system acts on it, and the film records what the system did. The photograph is evidence that an event took place.

PhotoGram Plate 0117, (2017).
from Visions from the Shoreline
unique analogue 8 × 10 inch film plate

What remains

Once the exposure is made, the system that produced it comes apart. The water settles. The caustic field, which existed for a fraction of a second, disappears entirely. Whatever arrangement of subject, light and surface produced the image cannot be returned to; each configuration occurs once, under conditions that will not recur in the same form ever again. The moment and its recording are resolutely unique.

This understanding of the photograph as the surviving material consequence of an unrepeatable event also informed my decision, announced in 2013, to cease producing editions and thereafter realise the work only as unique objects. [11]

What survives this dismantling is the original E-6 transparency, the direct material record of the encounter and the one element of the construction that outlasts the water settling into stillness. The body of water, the light, the precise energy of the surface at the instant of exposure: each belonged only to the moment it was activated. The photograph carries what nothing else from that moment does: evidence fixed within the original transparency that the event did indeed occur.

I develop this proposition at full length in The Photograph As Event: Light, Water and the Conditions of Form, which follows the studio as constructed system, water as lens, light as structure, resonance as form and the photograph as material trace through to their fullest argument. [D]

Water acts as the lens through which light is reorganised. The artist establishes the precise and exacting conditions. Matter responds, duration accumulates and the exposure receives their consequence. Once the surface settles and the construction disappears, the photograph remains: the material trace of an event that can no longer be recovered.

The photograph is a physical event. Light acts upon matter over time within constructed conditions. What remains is evidence.

object 37, (2014).
from the series Oil + Water
180 × 94 × 52 cm
70 ⅞ × 37 × 20 ½ inches
Latitude: 58.127247° N, Longitude: 56.641561° E
ice ossuary located in the forest to change with the winter cycle