Artist Reception: Thursday July 9th, 2020
4-6pm
Below the Surface: A revealing portrait of Wellfleet’s ponds
View Below the Surface virtually here
Artist’s Statement:
Water has long been a place where I find peace, healing, strength and meaning. Wellfleet’s kettle ponds are where I go to immerse myself deeply in these things.
Since I began photographing thirty years ago, I have let curiosity guide my work and, when inspiration strikes, and a project feels right, I lose myself in it. Wellfleet’s ponds offered me the opportunity to explore many themes deep in nature, and the journey was a privilege and joy.
I began visiting Wellfleet with my family in 2007 and immediately felt a deep connection with the ponds. Several summers later, with a small waterproof camera in hand, I started photographing myself underwater. What began as a curiosity became an obsession and for many years, over our two-week visits each August, I tried to capture the magic and mystery of these wondrous ponds.
My overall artistic practice is concerned with transformation and, like so much of my work, this project has involved chance and play. Underwater, as plants float, water ripples, sunlight refracts and my body twists and turns, photographing is unpredictable and exciting. It is a dance and the elements often come together to create something revelatory. This body of work is an intimate portrait of the ponds and an exploration of man’s relationship to nature below the surface.
Over an eight-year span, I spent countless hours photographing in Wellfleet’s ponds. I wanted to explore how I fit into this environment. How it transformed me. How I could use this space to create strange and unexpected images. I gravitated toward the perimeters, where the plant life is extraordinary.
Below the water’s surface, I explored how intimately and intricately I could integrate into this habitat and experimented with boundaries of body, nature and self. Where do I end? Where does nature begin? In these ponds, with their aquatic plants, murky sediment and dark depths, I felt a connection to something primal, which I hoped to capture in my work. Plant stems become nerves, blood vessels, cords and entanglements. Some photographs are quiet and peaceful. Others are more enigmatic. All of them are meant to evoke spiritual and psychological associations that I hope speak to each viewer in a personal way.
These photographs offer a unique perspective on underwater landscapes and figurative photography. Having a human presence in each underwater scene can be eye-opening. It adds a complexity to the scene and invites the viewer to imagine how each of us fits into the natural environment rather than stands apart from it. In some of these images, the body is readily apparent. In others, barely at all. But the human presence is always there.
Water, of course, is essential to understanding the work. Water connotes many aspects of the human condition: birth, fertility, renewal and the subconscious, among others. Water evokes a wellspring of emotions, dreams, fantasies and fears. By diving into Wellfleet’s ponds, I tried to delve into and visualize these ideas in a visceral and intuitive way.
Recently, this project has also become a reflection on the state of our natural world and what’s at risk should we lose natural treasures like these glorious ponds. Since I began photographing a decade ago, the flora in some of the ponds has dwindled—particularly over the past three summers. I do not know if this is from “warming” in the ponds; if it’s cyclical and perhaps not related to climate change; or due to some other cause. But symbolically, it speaks volumes to me. The change in the ponds represents what we risk losing on a global scale.
Ultimately, with this project, I attempted to convey a deep sense of mystery. My goal was to reveal the ethereal, dream-like quality of this underwater experience and convey a cohesive sense of place: a mysterious world that inspires the viewer’s imagination.
As with all my work, I did not digitally alter or manipulate these photographs. I used a waterproof digital camera for this project and these images are exactly what I saw and created in-camera.
The photographs in Below the Surface are a selection from a much larger body of work, which includes dozens of additional images.
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Richard Silberman is a writer and photographer from Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown in numerous gallery exhibitions over his 30 year career.
