| | | Stefano Nicolini
Swimming Pool
(Piscine)
For thirty years now, at all latitudes of our wonderful planet, I have been photographing oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, marshes, waterfalls, clouds, snow-covered areas, icebergs and glaciers. In other words, water in all of its states and the living beings - protagonists of the environments it gives life to. Where there is water there is purity. The extremely pleasant sensation within it is perceivable, and it is one of the most noble ones we can actually appreciate. Therefore, I slowly ended up removing from my most significant works human beings, guilty of polluting purity in all of its forms, in the natural environments as well as in ideals, dreams, and values.
Perhaps, then, it is inevitable that in order to find a thread for our existence, I now find myself returning to photographing man in a swimming pool. This is the only liquid environment in which he is the undisputed protagonist, engaged in the last expression of absolute purity of which, according to my opinion, he is capable: the athletic act.
In Swimming Pools, accomplished during the last 2009 FINA World Championships in Rome, I therefore passed from photographing the gesture of the nature to photographing the nature of the gesture. Before getting into the relevant considerations, however, I do want to point out the only photograph exhibited which reproduces a swimming pool void of people. It was impossible not to photograph it because, in contrast to other sport stadiums, which when deserted only communicate events concerning the past, a swimming pool full of water is always a pulsing vital body. The weaves of the water or the lanes are ready at all times to transform themselves into lines on which one can write another page of exhilarating emotions, magnetic perceptions, seducing visions. They change to my eyesight according to the temporal viewpoint from which I observe them with my camera.
The Swimmers are at the starting blocks. Ready, go! I see them suspended in the air, stretching their bodies to the utmost, penetrating the water and re-emerging aggressively as they start to repeat their swimming movements in an obsessive manner. Apparently they are incapable of thinking. They seem wrapped up in a cold speechless beauty, figurative of the kind without feeling, reduced to pure aesthetic, models for growing hosts of men and women who unravel their existence diving into the monotony of acting without ideals. Humanoids.
An impossible world. The protagonists of my Photo Drawings, pure and simple photographs actually, find refuge from present day's anxieties, at times with the aid of the graphic representation of comic strokes, in a dimension at the same time dream-like and irreverent. A hand reaching out like a claw; legs fluctuating tenuously, while others contrasting in their physicality with what seems to be their own shadow, in the image depicting the falling into the water of two athletes in a competition of synchronized diving; divers' bodies suspended in the air, between reality and dream; the silhouette of a swimmer intangible like a ghost that seems to be crossing the lanes of the swimming pool transversely. Finally, the photo of the swimming pool void of people which seals the invitation to dream, encouraging the observer to penetrate such dimension.
The action of the Divers, the third series of the Swimming Pool images, is instead considered absolutely human in the succession of the physicality of the movements which, owing to a tonic nakedness, finds the craved explosive carnality. A joyful carnality in open contrast with the loneliness which characterizes Swimmers reproduced in impersonal scenarios deprived of the passionate background of the terraces. This joyful carnality is supported by that of the blazing chromatisms of the spectators corroborating the indisputable human essence of the athletic act.
My perspective of reality is integrated by a further temporal viewpoint through the photographs dedicated to the lively and light elegance of Synchronized Swimming. The graceful and enchanting free diving of its interpreters, who dissolve their bodies in the liquid of the competition rectangle, shows me the way which has to be pursued in order to discover an interpretation to our lives. Such way is found by searching for a closer connection with the natural environment, from which the existence of mankind began.
I nourish my personal free diving moments by photographing it again and again, while through the viewfinder of my camera the natural element sinks into me becoming vital lymph. We are all athletes of our existence.
Stefano Nicolini (June 2010)
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