Beneath the Surface: Springs and Swamps
June 5 – 29, 2008
The Mark of Water: Florida’s Springs and Swamps
These photographs were made in a geographical location that is both seductive and sickening. This place is Florida, home to some of the most unique and breathtaking ecosystems in the world. But it is no secret that Florida is a victim of its own allure. Along with these remarkable environments, it is screaming with out of control development. I am not interested in making pictures of what created this mayhem; it’s all over the media. I want to show what you haven’t seen.
I bring you unique views of rare landscapes. The pictures are hard to classify, try as people will. No one genre fits. This ambiguity is their strength and very much part of the world from which they come. The photographs are not manipulated.
The pictures are from two related bodies of work. The first series was shot in the freshwater rivers and springs of north and central Florida. This exploration and the resulting photographs inspired a trek to the southern part of the state where the most magnificent primordial swamps are located in Big Cypress National Preserve and its neighbor, Everglades National Park. Parts of the park and preserve are a mere forty-five minutes from the sprawl of Miami to the east and Naples to the west. Via the good fortune of Artist-in-Residence awards from both the park and the preserve I got to explore this vibrant and organic region.
Exquisite natural light is used solely to illuminate these pictures. In open water there is ever-present particulate matter. Much of this mud and muck, is the living, and breathing, matter that seasons the soup and reflects, refracts and bends the light to create its complexity. There is no attempt by me to slick up the environments or for that matter, the pictures. These places are powerful and visceral and to show the essence of these remarkable areas, the photographs are as layered and rich as are the environments. And sometimes, therefore the pictures are unapologetically messy, messy at its most appealing.
These photographs are in no way intended to be a scientific mapping of Florida’s wilds. But, due to my pure obsession with these extraordinary places it has become some sort of survey in a looser and more poetic way. One location leads me to another and I continue my trek through Florida’s fresh waters. The mystery of these waters and the complicated puzzle of their continued existence inspires these pictures and continues to summon us to look even deeper.
In 2008 Blue Sky mounted an exhibition of my Springs and Swamps photographs. Pictures from this series had been seen in group shows as well as a few solo venues. But Blue Sky’s impressive reputation along with its elegant new space brought a certain graceful authority and tremendous visibility to the work. It inspired others.
Kevin Miller the Director/Curator of The Southeast Museum of Photography (SMP) in Daytona Beach expanded the exhibited in 2011, now calling it The Mark of Water: Florida’s Springs and Swamps. The museum hung the work for four months then traveled it to the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Fort Myers, FL 2011, Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts, Pensacola State College, Pensacola, FL 2013. Most recently, 2014, the exhibit hung at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, FL for five months
www.karenglaserphotography.com
