Sailors and surfers have a unique relationship with waves, and we’ve never seen anyone capture that relationship the way Paris-born St. Bart resident Pierre Carreau did with this recent series of photos from his AquaViva project. Here’s a short excerpt of Carreau’s perspective, and you can see a lot more at his beautiful site or Facebook page.
Carreau observes that the photographic images of AquaViva may sometimes be perceived as objects rather than as two-dimensional representations. The play of light off the multitude of facets and curves on the water’s surface gives the image a sculptural quality that enhances the sense of stillness and power. This simultaneous depiction of roiling movement and suspended kinetic energy parallels the dual nature of the oceans and of water itself: life-giving and yet dangerous, inviting and yet fearsome, primordial and yet ever-changing and always renewed. This sculptural effect of dynamism in static suspension is at once conscious and haphazard, a function of the rapid genesis of these images and the evident fact that the artist cannot possibly see the final work at the very moment of its birth.
