Aqua and chalk: the whole picture lives between the turquoise of the pool and the milky grey of an overcast sky that has all but erased the horizon. Against those two soft fields stands a white diving tower, tier upon tier, each platform stenciled FORT LAUDERDALE, its ladders and springboards drawn in the flat light like a blueprint. Two boys, small in their swim briefs, wait on separate levels, arms already lifted overhead into the streamlined shape of a dive. The color is calm to the point of silence, and the silence is part of the subject.
The title names two of the four elements, air and water, and the image lets them face each other with the tower and its climbers as the hinge. One diver is higher, one lower, both suspended in the instant before gravity claims them, their raised hands pointing at the same pale nothing. Down at the near edge a lane rope breaks the hush with its confetti of red, blue, yellow and green floats, the only loud thing in a scene otherwise tuned to whisper. Everything waits, poised, on the far side of the plunge.
Meyerowitz, who moved from the street to the 8×10 view camera and taught American color to be serious alongside Shore and Eggleston, reads a municipal pool as a stage for elemental drama. He is a great describer of light on water, from Cape Light onward, and his work lives in MoMA, the Met and the Boston MFA. This archival pigment print holds the exact chalk-and-aqua register, the tower crisp, the boys about to become air.
Aqua and chalk: the whole picture lives between the turquoise of the pool and the milky grey of an overcast sky that has all but erased the horizon. Against those two soft fields stands a white diving tower, tier upon tier, each platform stenciled FORT LAUDERDALE, its ladders and springboards drawn in the flat light like a blueprint. Two boys, small in their swim briefs, wait on separate levels, arms already lifted overhead into the streamlined shape of a dive. The color is calm to the point of silence, and the silence is part of the subject.
The title names two of the four elements, air and water, and the image lets them face each other with the tower and its climbers as the hinge. One diver is higher, one lower, both suspended in the instant before gravity claims them, their raised hands pointing at the same pale nothing. Down at the near edge a lane rope breaks the hush with its confetti of red, blue, yellow and green floats, the only loud thing in a scene otherwise tuned to whisper. Everything waits, poised, on the far side of the plunge.
Meyerowitz, who moved from the street to the 8×10 view camera and taught American color to be serious alongside Shore and Eggleston, reads a municipal pool as a stage for elemental drama. He is a great describer of light on water, from Cape Light onward, and his work lives in MoMA, the Met and the Boston MFA. This archival pigment print holds the exact chalk-and-aqua register, the tower crisp, the boys about to become air.