Water Without the Horizon

IN IMAGES

In A Perfect Medium****, published by MW Editions, physician and cell biologist Bob Farese, Jr. photographs water in all its guises, and from so close that the viewer dissolves into it, losing all sense of scale, space, and time.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Bob Farese, Jr.

After air, water is perhaps the element that most resists photography. Elusive by nature, it is typically captured underwater, at sporting events (surfing, sailing), or on expeditions at sea. More often still, it is photographed from the shore or the deck of a boat, relying on the horizon to give it context and composition for, as Farese observes in his foreword, “humans tend to think of water as something outside ourselves.”

By removing that horizon line, the photographer removes every point of reference. A burst of foam becomes its own architecture. An Icelandic glacier reveals a texture akin to charcoal shading. A school of fish takes on the grain of woven cloth. Information exists, but it is pared down to the essential and relegated to the back of the book, with the precision of a lab notebook: place, hour, date.

Between 2020 and 2025, Farese photographed whatever water lay before him, sometimes in Paris on a November evening, sometimes in Copenhagen at dawn, sometimes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There is no feat of daring in these images, no waiting on the photographer’s part for the perfect wave.

This choice finds its explanation in Farese’s own path, a physician and cell biologist who studies metabolism. “I am drawn to the water that flows within us,” he writes. “We are, in essence, water. About 70 percent of our mass, but more than 99 percent of our molecules, are water.”

Medium, the title of his book, names both the vital element and the photographic support: an echo of the title of his first book, Am I Not Light, likewise borrowed from physics.

Page by page, contemplation tips over into argument. “To pollute water is to pollute ourselves,” the author affirms. “To poison water is to poison ourselves. So the simple truth is this: to care for water is to care for ourselves.” If the horizon has vanished from these images, it is also so that we might stop looking at water from a distance.

A Perfect Medium by Bob Farese, Jr., MW Editions, 144 pages, $50.