Pools, Rizzoli, 2020

A celebratory ode to the joy and enduring allure of the swimming pool in visual culture.

Organized by theme, from the glamour of the poolside party to the simple, meditative pleasure of laps in the water, the selected photographs probe the long obsession with swimming pools amongst photographers of all generations and styles. Photographers whose images are featured in this book include Sølve Sundsbø, Glen Luchford, Stephen Shore, Mert & Marcus, Diana Markosian, Martin Parr, Martine Franck, Alex Webb, Alice Hawkins, and Nick Knight. Foreword by Leanne Shapton.

Published 7 April 2020

Extract

I have swum in various ways. As a child, I did so out of routine – to be good, to try hard, to achieve. It was something my parents felt suitable, and so, a few times a week, we drove to an unremarkable pool in an unremarkable town and I whizzed back and forth, my little body on autopilot, like a windup toy. Later, I’d go to sleep, hair still dripping wet, with a faded red towel laid over my pillow. I trained myself to respond instantly to the sound of the gun – I learnt never to dawdle. I learnt the strange body arcs required of butterfly, the flicks of the tumble-turns, the fearlessness needed to keep on holding your breath, just for one more stroke, one more reach, one more second. I was fast, but not fast enough to make it further than my county, so, as with most childhood hobbies, it was put aside for other ambitions with more measurable goals – deadlines, rewards, some promise of remuneration. I went to university and barely swum. A few years later, in Italy with a friend, having peddled a tiny plastic boat out to sea, a case of beer slung on the back, I discovered that I was suddenly desperately afraid of deep water. Drowning wasn’t the concern – I knew my muscles would have retained the memory to crawl fast on demand – it was the potential of the unknown, the thought of what could be lurking. Having always been both blessed and cursed with an active imagination, I could picture some great mouth enveloping one of my limbs as they entered the water, teeth sinking into an especially fleshy part of my form as I tried to kick towards land. Soon after, I noticed that, in my years out of the water, the fear had extended to the pool. In the deep end, I found my eyes darting around, alert to any shadowy forms. I decided to deal with it with in much the same way I deal with everything in life – by blindly throwing myself in. I swam obsessively, hurling my quivering form into ponds and pools and the occasional river in the hope my anxious breath would eventually settle. I was determined to overcome it. And, eventually, with time, I learnt what it is to swim for pleasure – to feel a calm solemnness underwater. To truly escape to the water, rather than just to move through it. 

In 1974, Laurie Colvin wrote a short story titled Wet. In it, Carl, a faculty member in the university history department, grows violently jealous of his wife Lucy’s love of water. He learns she has been swimming every day in a Chicago pool during the winter without him knowing; “Walking home, he decided to confront her, but he could not arrange a question that was neither accusatory not whimpering, and he could not articulate the source of his pain. Was it that she swam, or that she didn’t tell him?” He follows her, he attempts to swim with her, his jealously remains. He lies in bed awake, as she sleeps, tired from laps; “What had grieved him was simply a fact: every day of her life she would be at some point damp, then drying, and for one solid time, wet.” 

It’s not totally irrational to be jealous of the pool, of a loved one’s taste for the sweet allure of swimming. So private is it, so routine, and often so freeing, 

that it is no wonder that those close to us swimmers could feel rejected in favour of it – are we escaping them, they may worry? Where do our real loyalties lie? The French poet Paul Valéry wrote in his journal, “To plunge into water, to move one’s whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love.” 

Swimming, like love, is hard to pin down. Its appeal is slippery – difficult to explain – and the sensation is near impossible to put into words without resorting to clichés. The feel of being in water is so familiar, a return to a womb-like state, yet also so unusual, so exotic, so erotic, sometimes, that attempts to describe its multiplicity tend to fall short. Yet, throughout history, the pool – and the pond, the beach, the river – has attracted so many who seek to capture it, whether in film, painting, literature or, as celebrated within this volume, photography. Avid readers, I hope, will enjoy the wandering bibliography that meanders through this book – a quote to open each chapter, forming a reading list of sorts for those keen to enjoy some great swimming scenes from literature. 

As in image-making, in writing, the pool can be an emblem for many different moods or states, some positive, some negative, some heady and freeing, others restrictive and dangerous. In Splash!, an anthology of writing on swimming, published in 1996, the book’s editor Laurel Blossom writes, “In the world of water, we become aware of our skin, of the body’s limits and definitions, while we are simultaneously wrapped in an element so familiar, so delightful, so sensual that we feel we have come home. Because life seeks both merger and separation, swimming is the perfect correlative for its mystery.” As Blossom implies, the pool is a vessel, a backdrop perhaps, on which to project so many tales – all manner of fantasies or nuances. The pool in The Great Gatsby – a looming symbol of the emptiness of wealth, the illusive nature of luxury – is very different to, say, the heavenly, sun-drenched pool in Call Me by Your Name, or the much-used pool in Cassandra at the Wedding into which our struggling heroine regularly dives to try to find some semblance of peace. Similarly, the pools in the photographs of Sølve Sundsbø or Deanna Templeton, which suggest freedom, balance, transformation, peace, are a world apart from the glamourous pools in the work of Slim Aarons or Helmut Newton. Many photographers are moved by the theatre of swimming – the action that happens not in but around the water; the posing, the preening, the pool parties. For them, it is a movie set, ready for action. To some, often male photographers, the pool is an excuse for lithe bodies, undressed for summer fun. To them, the pool is bikinis and tan-lines. Cocktails and kisses and curves and bright white teeth and summer romance – it’s Phoebe Cates as Linda in her red bikini in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet, for others, the pool is about an emotional, rather than physical, state – an idealized version of a mind, undisturbed, open, serene. The pool can be gritty, a place of past glory. It can be somber, silent. It can be a shining symbol of everything you ever wanted – time, style, wealth – or the setting of something terrible; abandonment, accidents, drowning. 

At points, one feels hard pushed to find a photographer who hasn’t captured a pool, at some point, in some place. It’s a place where life happens, where people go to perform, to relax, to flirt, to play – of course image-makers wind up there. Some photographers have made some of their greatest pictures in and around water. Take, for example, Guy Bourdin, whose pool pictures are both a divine celebration of blue, and a nod to the joy of poolside life, to something playful, something hedonistic, something vaguely dangerous, something infantile, which is aroused in all of us when near water. Or Stephen Shore, whose image of his wife Ginger half-in, half-out, on the steps of pool at the Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida is undoubtedly one of the most perfect pool shots ever taken. Or Toni Frissell, whose photographs of models floating underwater, gowns billowing in gentle motion, seemed to preempt the later boom of fashion film. In fashion photography, the pool has had an important history – it has, at points, served as an emblem for travel, progress, for a liberated, modern woman, at peace with her body and joyful in her independence. The pool helped get photographers out of the studio, and on location, embracing the visual and narrative possibilities of the real world. Tellingly, the first photographic cover of British Vogue, from 1932, featured not a ball gown or tailoring but a swimsuit. Edward Steichen’s image of a smiling athletic woman in a white cap and a red costume, a beach ball held above her head, looks as cheerful now as it probably did back then. The image was actually shot in the studio, rather than at the beach or pool, but the mood is there – the pleasure of water, the allure of sun-kissed skin and toned limbs. Happiness. Play. Holiday. It is a classic pool picture. 

Some imagemakers occupy themselves with the water itself – the bubbles, the splashes. Others like how the body reacts – the sinking, the floating, the fluidity, the contortions. Many are there for the light, and the graphic, angular shapes of the sides, diving boards and tiles – such pleasing symmetry. The appeal of the pool is both visual and emotional – is can be used definitely, as a set of lines and borders, or suggestively, as a carrier for various subplots. For this reason, I decided to organize the images in this volume not by image- maker, or chronology, but by varied moods or themes of pool-life; Holiday, Movement, Meditation, Glamour, and so on. Some relate to sensations that I have experienced firsthand – the peace of swimming with calm determination, alone in an empty pool, as opposed to the riot of ducking and diving amongst friends on holiday, goggles cast aside, or the meditative quality of laps, in contrast to the frisson of a cocktail by the pool in some expensive place, surrounded by people in expensive things. Others are notions that seems to attract photographers of various types, time and time again – there are pictures by photographers young and old within this volume, from the very new to the widely-celebrated, there are documentary images and fashion images, casual shots and highly staged productions. There are images about sex, images about architecture, images about clothing, images about celebrities. There are images about rebellion, determination, kinship, routine, longing, taste, and, of course, as Valéry could have predicted, images about love.