Rising, breaking, climbing the blue — a body has just torn upward out of the water and the photograph keeps it suspended there, half made of flesh and half made of foam. We read a head, a darkened back, the bend of a torso, but most of the figure has dissolved into the white explosion of spray it carries with it, a great fir-tree of water flung against a saturated cobalt field. The diver is leaving the surface, and the surface refuses to let go cleanly; it comes up too, in shards and feathers and a curtain of droplets.
Meyerowitz has stripped the scene of everything but two substances and one colour. There is no sky, no edge of pool, no horizon to steady us — only the deep, even blue that fills the frame and the silver-white turbulence the body drags through it. The blue is so total that it reads less as water than as atmosphere, an element rather than a place, which is what the series title, Air/Water, proposes. At the bottom the disturbance settles into rings and ripples, the calm record of the violence happening just above, so the image holds the before and after of a single instant in the same rectangle.
It is unusual to see this photographer working so close to abstraction. The lyric attention to light is here, but turned toward something almost without form, a figure in the act of becoming weather. What the long looking yields is not the athletic feat but its residue: the way a human shape, caught between leaving and arriving, can briefly look like a force of nature, all motion and spume, before the water closes over and the blue goes quiet again.
Rising, breaking, climbing the blue — a body has just torn upward out of the water and the photograph keeps it suspended there, half made of flesh and half made of foam. We read a head, a darkened back, the bend of a torso, but most of the figure has dissolved into the white explosion of spray it carries with it, a great fir-tree of water flung against a saturated cobalt field. The diver is leaving the surface, and the surface refuses to let go cleanly; it comes up too, in shards and feathers and a curtain of droplets.
Meyerowitz has stripped the scene of everything but two substances and one colour. There is no sky, no edge of pool, no horizon to steady us — only the deep, even blue that fills the frame and the silver-white turbulence the body drags through it. The blue is so total that it reads less as water than as atmosphere, an element rather than a place, which is what the series title, Air/Water, proposes. At the bottom the disturbance settles into rings and ripples, the calm record of the violence happening just above, so the image holds the before and after of a single instant in the same rectangle.
It is unusual to see this photographer working so close to abstraction. The lyric attention to light is here, but turned toward something almost without form, a figure in the act of becoming weather. What the long looking yields is not the athletic feat but its residue: the way a human shape, caught between leaving and arriving, can briefly look like a force of nature, all motion and spume, before the water closes over and the blue goes quiet again.