We live on a planet defined by water. It surrounds us, moves through us, sustains us. We build our cities beside it, move our goods across it, divert it, dam it, bottle it and consume it. We depend upon it completely. Yet there is something unsettling in this dependence. There can be too much water, too little water, or no water at all. The same element that makes life possible can just as easily threaten it.
Fluid grew out of my concern for this imbalance. Research into global warming, severe storms, drought, flooding and the growing scarcity of clean water presented a future that was difficult to comprehend. Estimates placed deaths from water-related disease between two and five million people each year, while researchers warned that billions more could eventually find themselves vulnerable to storms and other weather extremes. Flood and drought seemed like opposite sides of the same condition. Water could mean abundance or scarcity, survival or death, necessity or commodity. The numbers were staggering, but numbers have a way of remaining abstract. I was more interested in the world they asked us to imagine. Using myself as model, I began to enter that world.
I photograph my body submerged in oceans, lakes, quarries and swamps, among vegetation, wreckage and structures swallowed by water. Elsewhere, water disappears altogether. The photographs are constructions, made entirely on location, but they are not documents of catastrophe. They imagine fragments of a world thrown out of balance, where the relationship between the body and its environment can no longer be trusted. Water is an uneasy metaphor because there is no position outside of it. We carry it within us. We consume it to survive. We enter it for pleasure. But beneath its surface the rules immediately change. Breath becomes finite. Gravity loosens its hold. Orientation becomes uncertain. Sinking begins to resemble falling and floating can resemble flight. The body remains somewhere in between, suspended between control and surrender.
In 2002, shortly before traveling to Eastern Europe, I learned to dive. During that trip, I was evacuated during the flooding of Prague. Two weeks later, while diving in the Adriatic, I suffered decompression illness. Those experiences became the catalyst for Fluid. After returning home, the diving skills I had recently learned gave me a way to begin making the work underwater. In December 2004, I received support from Creative Capital to continue the project. Weeks later, the Indian Ocean tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia. I was already sensitive to the possibility of offending people after the response to Life Goes On, and the images coming from the tsunami made me question my motivations. How does one make an image about catastrophe while others are living through it? At what point does a warning become an appropriation of someone else’s suffering?
Fluid was conceived as a warning. At the time, the world depicted in these photographs still seemed to belong somewhere ahead of us. Over the years that distance has grown shorter. What once required imagining has become increasingly recognizable. There is no resolution in these photographs. The body remains suspended somewhere between sinking and floating, resistance and surrender. It holds its breath. It waits. Water will find its own level, filling the spaces left open to it and disappearing from those where it can no longer remain. The body can struggle against these conditions for only so long. Eventually, it must surface, adapt, or be overcome. Nature does not need us to survive. We need it. Fluid occupies the space between those two facts.