On March 15, the Morris Graves Museum of Art opened the once perennial exhibition Images of Water following a pandemic-induced hiatus. This return marks the 28th year of the juried exhibition — a tradition older than the museum itself, which opened on Jan. 1, 2000, with the turn of the millennium. This year, Images of Water was juried by the exceptionally accomplished, Humboldt-raised Rebekah Burgess. Burgess chose Stilson Snow’s “Wave Function” for Best of Show and Mary Ann Machi’s “Spindle-knots” for First Place.
Installed in the William Thonson Gallery, the museum’s largest, Images of Water includes 49 entries selected for presentation. The call for submissions was interpreted in varied ways, but most dominantly rendered through beachscapes and traditional landscape imagery.
The genre of landscape, through its iterations in photography, painting and other visual arts, has received due criticism for a formulaic approach that customarily avoids depicting any elements of human presence. This approach was instrumental to colonial settlement, as it suggested the depicted lands (and waters) were void of custodians, bountiful and ripe for the taking. However, photographs of land and water have also become a vehicle for many contemporary artists (such as Laura Aguilar, Lori Blondeau and Ana Mendieta) to examine land in relation to gender, sex, race and citizenship. And so, photo representations of land and water, as well as their attached cultural significance, continue to evolve.
Out of 49 pieces in the Images of Water exhibition, 36 depict traditional, people-less, watery landscapes, leaving just 13 entries that engage with other representations of water (some more adjacent to landscape photography than others). Not that these photographers are intentionally presenting their renderings of the natural world as uninhabited to advance colonial narratives. Nor do I suggest we stop taking landscape photographs. But it’s important to recognize the tension of this tradition remains embedded in how we’ve been taught to see and document landscapes — an aesthetic inheritance that persists even as artists bring new perspectives to the genre.
There are, of course, many other reasons to photograph water. Water poses several technical challenges for photographers, particularly in balancing a perfectly exposed image; as light dances across watery planes, it can reflect at unpredictable angles, causing blown-out highlights or underexposed shadows. Water is often a moving subject, demanding patience, a sharp eye and a strong grasp of shutter speed. Producing images of water, then, is not as easy as it sounds.
While most of the photographs aim at the Pacific Ocean, or maybe the bays, estuaries, inlets, or rivers that feed into it, artist Kylie Maxfield is one of a handful who turn their attention elsewhere. Instead, Maxfield’s two photographs refreshingly redirect her lens to seeps, slow drips and showerheads where water swells into our built environments. This sidestep offers us an opportunity to think through the productive forces of photography, affect and aesthetics.
“Leak” (2023) is a black and white 120mm medium format film photograph capturing molding ceiling tiles where the damp, spreading stains mirror the way emulsion clings to film stock. Whereas water is celebrated elsewhere in the Images of Water exhibition, in Maxfield’s “Leak,” water is an unwelcome, haunting spectral force evidencing the structural vulnerability of an edifice. The ceiling tiles reference a neutral professional or institutional setting. Here, however, neutrality is, literally and metaphorically, indifference or neglect that allows toxins to grow.
A couple of images farther into the gallery, we find Maxfield’s second piece, “Shower/Desire” (2022), photographed on 4-inch-by-5-inch black and white film, which shows a nude female figure from the waist down as she showers. Maxfield’s choice of using a 4×5 camera here points to a paradox of presence and the photographer’s understanding of camera-subject relationships. These accordion-style cameras’ sheer size and meticulous nature render intimate, candid image-making nearly impossible, often making sitters hyper-aware of their relationship to the gazing camera. The nostalgia and often novelty of posing for a 4×5 camera can be exciting, and knowing images need to be developed before viewing makes many subjects less self-conscious because they are not confronted with their own likeness when turning to the back of the camera for a sneak peek.
It is a difficult task not to objectify a nude female sitter but Maxfield has gracefully done so. It may be tempting to point to the mold growing on the shower floor as an abject counterpoint to the beauty of the female form in the photograph but this is too simple an answer that makes objectification a question of aesthetic value. Instead, Maxfield’s technical approach allows her to personify and not objectify. This is realized through the soft, subtly blurred water droplets cascading around her subject. There is a paradox in photography: The longer the camera is permitted to look with a slower shutter speed, the less we can actually see. Though it’s subtle, the softness of Maxfield’s image makes the act of looking slightly more difficult, transferring our experience of the image to an emotional register. Black and white film stock creates a second layer of distance between the subject and a real-world representation of how our human eyes would instead gaze up on the bather. While it could be argued that these choices — a slow shutter speed and black and white film — disembody the subject, Maxfield’s treatment of her sitter instead renders her as a nuanced, even complicated figure through technical decision-making.
With unique attention to materiality, texture, and details, Maxfield allows us to expand upon the peripheral vestiges of what it means to produce and look at “images of water.” Water is not a neutral subject: We are all made of water and we all need it to survive; we use water to demarcate borders and geopolitical thresholds; these lands were settled through the transatlantic movement of bodies across waters; and we increasingly fear global rising water levels. A history of photography is also a history of water. And a history of water would bring us to our knees.
The Images of Water exhibition continues through April 20 at the Morris Graves Museum of Art (636 F St., Eureka).
Alexander Rondeau (he/him) is a Canadian PhD student focusing on queer rural art. He holds an MFA in art criticism and curatorial practice, and now lives in Arcata.
This article appears in How the Klamath Dams came down.