Exploring America’s Summertime Beyond the Surface

In the period between the early 1970s and early 80s, Larry Sultan, a conceptual artist and photographer, regularly equipped himself with goggles, an underwater camera, and a handheld flash to venture into community swimming pools around the San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by pictures in a Red Cross manual, he took photographs of scenes of parents training their children to swim, swimmers floating aimlessly, and individuals holding their breath and playing tantalizingly beneath the surface.

Sultan took these shots in the non-digital times, relying on the development of the film to view the results, which were often distorted by the movement of his subjects in the water. The photographs, compiled in the book SWIMMERS (MACK, $65), and captured between 1978 and 1982, are mesmerizing compositions that reflect on American life.

“These pictures were made at a time when I found that much of my artistic activity was cut off from my body,” said Sultan, who passed away in 2009, in an artist’s statement.

According to the art historian Philip Gefter, who writes about Sultan’s work in the book, “Larry began ‘Swimmers’ with a very literal fear of deep water and of drowning.” Gefter continues by stating that the photographer gradually overcame his fear by venturing into deeper areas of the pool and capturing images that he described as “excessively physical, sensual and painterly,” even though the abstractness of the photos made him feel, in Gefter’s words, “self-conscious and exposed”—presumably like the swimmers themselves.