Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Photographs / Debra Livingston
Photography has the capacity to capture the immediate moment, the very essence of an event and of time past, never to be repeated. These images of water are fragments of real time, 'reality on pause mode', uploaded to the digital public domain where we can share the experience of waters' grace and vicissitude. These images selected from a perpetual photographic journal, comprise a study of water ranging from freshwater ponds and lakes to the vast salty oceans. Photographed around the Sunshine Coast where I live in Queensland, Australia they represent water as a continual moving malleable physical structure, adapting to any shape and form. Through the lens of the camera, these images show the visual volume of waters' malleability as a 'motion captured'.
Unlike a movie camera, that can pan and record the atmosphere of a scene, the photograph falls short of expressing the totality of the whole view and experience. When viewing a still image, particularly images about nature, the audience understands that a sensory deprivation from the real occurs. My response to this challenge was to seek to imbue the image with the essence of my subjective experience to give the audience a sense of being there with me at that moment, at that time and in that place. I sought to capture this continually moving entity and play with the aesthetics of the scene presented in order to express each moment in time to a varied cultural audience that may include people who have never visited the ocean. This play with water as an artistic expression of nature allows the audience to interpret and connect personally with each image by drawing from their own previous experiences of water. The photographs present to us the flow of water as a textural and colourful aesthetic and comprises of observations about the unique characteristics of water. My images show only a minute part of nature's voluminous effervescent fluid. Captured as a framed moment 'in' time they work simply to coerce the viewers' attention to see beyond the everyday and to immerse them, for a moment, with this important, wondrous and natural molecular structure that sustains our very existence.
[click each image for larger version]
