Anyone daydreaming of solitude on a crowded beach this summer might wish to trade places with the bathers in these images, part of a series begun four years ago by Richard Misrach. All of the pictures were taken from a balcony of a Hawaiian island hotel that he previously discovered while on vacation. To create the feeling of hovering above the swimmers, he deliberately excludes the horizon line from the frame — he’s making art, not documentary photographs — and he reinforces the feeling of aloneness in some cases by digitally removing other swimmers from the water in the post-production phase of his picture-making.
There’s another, more disquieting revelation in these photographs, one resulting from seeing these small human figures afloat in such vast seascapes. As in much of his other work — his images of the desert or of the sky above the Golden Gate Bridge, for example — Misrach here uses scale to put people in what he sees as their proper perspective. ”The huge scale enhances the beauty and the sense of the sublime,” he says of his pictures, ”but it also begins to expose our vulnerability and fragility as human beings.”
