Anyone who has watched waves pounding the shore knows what it’s like to be mesmerized by the surf. The eye wants to hold onto the water’s ever-changing patterns; the mind isn’t fast enough. It takes a camera to freeze the flux, and an artist to discover its shapes.
New York native Sandra Gottlieb has been transfixed by the Atlantic since she was a child. She first trained her camera on the ocean from the window of her house in Rockaway Beach, Queens in 1996, and she’s been exploring the territory ever since. In “October Waves,” her sixth series of seascapes, Gottlieb brings the ocean close. Wearing rubber boots, she’s waded into the surf with her Canon 5D and shot the waves as they crashed around her. Sometimes it seems we can hear the roar.
Fall is hurricane season and, on the shorelines of New York, the waves can be massive, the colors dark. In these images, whitecaps are no longer a pretty fringe on distant swells but salt and spume flying at your face. You are there for a thrilling moment, expecting to be swept away by a riptide. But then you’re not, because a photograph is a mediated experience. Sometimes, there are even droplets on the lens in these works, reminding us that a person with a camera stands between the tumult and us.
Seascapes have a long tradition in western art. During the Dutch Golden Age, marine painters celebratedboth the ocean’s power and its placidity. Later, British romantics John Constable and J. M.W. Turner, followed by French masters Eugène Delacroix and Gustav Courbet, showed how sea and sky could mirror states of mind. But only since the invention of the modern camera, fast films and digital technology have artists had the means to freeze the action and record precisely what happens when water hits sand and rock.
In her latest series, Gottlieb works in this nexus, examining the powerful colliding forces of nature and the intricate patterns that result. Sometimes she captures the millisecond after a wave hits the beach, the white droplets of spume flying skyward like so many startled birds. At others, she photographs the wave in free fall, just before it breaks.
Seen up close, the waters of Gottlieb’s Atlantic can seem abstract, the white scrumble of foam akin to Jackson Pollock’s splashed paint. At other times, her images read as closely observed, realistic portraits of the sea. Maybe that’s why these photographs feel at once classical and modern. The images of “October Waves” invite us to contemplate the act of seeing and the differences between camera and eye.