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Rapture of the Deep consists of eight large prints of digitally manipulated landscape images. The series deals with the glamour of risk as personified by eight famous British mountaineers from the 70s and 80s, a golden age of high altitude mountaineering which made many of them national media figures. When I was growing up these men were my heroes and they all died in the mountains. Each piece in the series is named for one of them, along with the location of his death. These images were created from photographs I made of underwater landscapes at Silfra, a unique location in Iceland.
It seems clear to me that there is some kind of connection between what drives climbers to pursue their sport and the concept of the sublime, when beauty and danger converge to create the profound. At the same time I believe that the sublime is in some sense a dream, an ideal that may be conceived but never truly realized. From my own experience I know how often the banal details of the quotidian world intervene when ever it seems near, and yet it remains in the mind and it is capable of driving the mountaineer to extremes, even to his death.
The images in this series are of constructed landscapes, ideals that never existed, at least not precisely as they are presented. In the tradition of landscape painting the foreground of each image includes a single figure of a mountaineer complete with 1970s era costume and equipment. Over the course of the series the mountaineer descends ever deeper into what seems to be some kind of nether world of blue caves and canyons. These images were created from photographs I made of underwater landscapes at Silfra, a unique location in Iceland. The fact that the original photographs were taken under water in some of the clearest and coldest water on earth creates subtly modulated lighting. All other clues to the origins of the images have been removed, for instance in most images the surface of the water above has been replaced with clouds photographed elsewhere in Iceland.
For this project I chose to conflate two wilderness sports, mountaineering and diving. They share many fundamental characteristics, they both combine elements of exploration, risk and solitude, together with some kind of quest for beauty. While it is true the mountaineer and the diver experience landscapes of hallucinatory beauty, it is also true that both of them are slowly dieing every second that they are too high or too deep.
The title of the project is both literal and ironic; the images are visually rapturous, in the kitsch sense of the title. On the other hand, ‘Rapture of the Deep’ is a term first coined by Jacque Cousteau (in French “L’ivresse Des Grandes Profondeurs”) to describe what is medically called “Nitrogen Narcosis”. This is a form of euphoria that divers experience below a certain depth and that can lead to death. At these depths high pressure nitrogen dissolved in the body’s tissues creates an experience both ecstatic and potentially deadly. This speaks directly to the nature of the sublime experience and the sacrifices that are demanded of one who goes in search of it.
Support for Rapture of the Deep has been provided by grants from the American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Dive support in Iceland provided by dive.is.
Learn more about the production of this project HERE.
Rapture of the Deep consists of eight large prints of digitally manipulated landscape images. The series deals with the glamour of risk as personified by eight famous British mountaineers from the 70s and 80s, a golden age of high altitude mountaineering which made many of them national media figures. When I was growing up these men were my heroes and they all died in the mountains. Each piece in the series is named for one of them, along with the location of his death. These images were created from photographs I made of underwater landscapes at Silfra, a unique location in Iceland.
It seems clear to me that there is some kind of connection between what drives climbers to pursue their sport and the concept of the sublime, when beauty and danger converge to create the profound. At the same time I believe that the sublime is in some sense a dream, an ideal that may be conceived but never truly realized. From my own experience I know how often the banal details of the quotidian world intervene when ever it seems near, and yet it remains in the mind and it is capable of driving the mountaineer to extremes, even to his death.
The images in this series are of constructed landscapes, ideals that never existed, at least not precisely as they are presented. In the tradition of landscape painting the foreground of each image includes a single figure of a mountaineer complete with 1970s era costume and equipment. Over the course of the series the mountaineer descends ever deeper into what seems to be some kind of nether world of blue caves and canyons. These images were created from photographs I made of underwater landscapes at Silfra, a unique location in Iceland. The fact that the original photographs were taken under water in some of the clearest and coldest water on earth creates subtly modulated lighting. All other clues to the origins of the images have been removed, for instance in most images the surface of the water above has been replaced with clouds photographed elsewhere in Iceland.
For this project I chose to conflate two wilderness sports, mountaineering and diving. They share many fundamental characteristics, they both combine elements of exploration, risk and solitude, together with some kind of quest for beauty. While it is true the mountaineer and the diver experience landscapes of hallucinatory beauty, it is also true that both of them are slowly dieing every second that they are too high or too deep.
The title of the project is both literal and ironic; the images are visually rapturous, in the kitsch sense of the title. On the other hand, ‘Rapture of the Deep’ is a term first coined by Jacque Cousteau (in French “L’ivresse Des Grandes Profondeurs”) to describe what is medically called “Nitrogen Narcosis”. This is a form of euphoria that divers experience below a certain depth and that can lead to death. At these depths high pressure nitrogen dissolved in the body’s tissues creates an experience both ecstatic and potentially deadly. This speaks directly to the nature of the sublime experience and the sacrifices that are demanded of one who goes in search of it.
Support for Rapture of the Deep has been provided by grants from the American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Dive support in Iceland provided by dive.is.
Learn more about the production of this project HERE.
Rapture of the Deep was inspired by my experiences of diving on tropical reefs; I was struck by the similarities between my visual experience of the reef and the tropes of nineteenth century sublime landscape painting. I realized that I could use digital photographs made underwater to create images of synthetic landscapes that would both celebrate and subvert this tradition. At first sight these would appear to be conventional dry-land landscapes, but on closer examination subtle effects of lighting and atmosphere would suggest that all is not what it seems. I set about a search for the ideal location, most importantly I would need the best possible under water visibility. I learned that this was not to be found on tropical reefs but in the coldest waters on the planet. Eventually I came across a dive site that is unique, the Silfra Ravine in Iceland where underwater geological formations created by the meeting of two plates of the earth’s crust combine with the longest underwater visibility any where on earth to create unique “landscapes”.
During the summer of 2007 I traveled to Iceland and made a number of dives in the lake at Thingvellir, where the Silfra Ravine is located. I had spent the previous year preparing, training in cold water diving and underwater photography in various lakes in the Midwestern USA. The dives at Thingvellir were challenging, involving water temperatures of 33 degrees (F), some strong currents and limited cavern diving. Luckily I had arranged to dive with a number of professional dive masters from dive.is who were able to guide me to the best locations. The shoot was very successful, as I had hoped the extremely clear water allowed me to make photographs of landscapes and rock formations that seem very similar to conventional mountain or desert landscapes except for the lighting effects of the underwater environment. In this context the lighting has more of the feel of an artificially lit miniature model rather than natural light.
