Brian Oglesbee and one of his "Water Series" prints
Meet Fine-Art Photographer Brian Oglesbee
Oglesbee's new book Aquatique will be released in September 2007
Every once in a while something really great happens to someone that
really deserves it and who has waited a really long time for it to
happen. And that is exactly the case with the upcoming publication of Brian Oglesbee's exquisite new book Aquatique
(Insight Editions, September 07, 2007). The book is going to be a
monograph featuring more than 100 of Brian's extraordinary underwater
figure studies, plus detail shots of some photos that let you delve
into an otherwise hidden level of his images. I wrote a feature on
Brian for the March/April edition of American Photo magazine (the issue that is currently on the stands).
I first met Brian about 15 years ago when I was writing for Photo District News and he was working largely as a product/advertising photographer (he photographed the Light Impressions
catalog for many years) and also shooting wild room set photos that
looked a cross between a furniture catalog and a Salvador Dali painting
(at least to me). About two years after I met him he began showing me
his early creations in what he calls his "Water Series" photographs. I
was captivated by the images and I've been lucky enough to see the
series evolve at very close range for the past 13 years.
Almost five years ago (long before the book contract was in sight)
Brian presented a slide show of some of the images to a group of elite
big name New York shooters at the NY PhotoGroup Salon. The group
included the likes of Jay Maisel, Howard Schatz and Walter Ioos. I was
in the room and the reaction was extraordinary: you could almost hear
the jaws dropping across the room as the images--and the detail shots
that followed--were projected in the darkness. Arnold Newman (who had
presented a wonderful 90-minute retrospective a few minutes before) was
obviously impressed--and more than a bit surprised when Brian explained
that there was no image editing involved. What was supposed to be a
quick 20-minute slide presentation turned into an hour-long-plus
question and answer period. It was a really fun evening and I think
Brian got great affirmation that he was onto something quite unusual.
During the next several years, however, Brian had to endure a lot of
false starts and dead ends in bringing this series to the publishing
world--largely because the publishing world is slow to take chances
when it comes to things like monographs. Proofs for the books bounced
around from New York to London to Paris (oh the favors we had to call
in here and in France to get those prints to Paris in time to enter a
publishing competition!) and finally found a home in California with
Insight Editions. It was a long, tiring and frustrating journey to get
the book into print with the right publisher but it was worth the agony
of many crushed expectations because he has finally found a publisher
that is going to do the book justice. Not only will the book be
published in a hardcover quadratone edition in a size large enough to
reveal the utter clarity and beauty of the images, but there will also
be a slip-cased limited edition (limited to an edition of 300) that
will be accompanied by an 11x14 fiber-based silver print.
The
moral here (I guess a story this long has to have a moral) is that if
you are committed to an art project, you'd better be prepared to run a
marathon to see it through. In the meantime, visit Brian Oglesbee's site
to view some images from the "Water Series" and you'll get a feel for
why he virtually devoted his artistic life to these aquatic figure
studies. Collectors no less impressive than Walter Ioos, Jay Maisel,
Howard Schatz and Sir Elton John have acquired his prints (which he
often prints to 40x60).
In the article below you'll read more about Brian's amazing "Water Series" photos and his new book Aquatique.
From Brian Oglesbee's "Water Series" Copyright 2007 Brian Oglesbee
Detail shot from Brian Oglesbee's "Water Series"
From American Photo Magazine
THE LIFE AQUATIC
Water and light and not one pixel of digital image editing are the ingredients of Brian Oglesbee's mysterious figure studies.
By Jeff Wignall
Almost five years ago Brian Oglesbee was invited to show his images at
the NY PhotoGroup Salon, an informal gathering of some of New York
City's most elite photographers. The group, which meets one evening a
month, counts Jay Maisel, Howard Schatz, and Gary Gladstone among its
members. Oglesbee wasn't the only presenter that night. His turn was to
come right after retrospectives by Walter Iooss and Arnold Newman and
just before a showing of Schatz's newest work--probably not the spot a
newcomer would choose in such a competitive lineup. As Oglesbee projected his first slide--a
black-and-white image of a mysterious female figure peering up from the
inky depths of a pool of bubble-covered water--there were some curious
murmurs. Then the photographer showed a detail of the first slide that
revealed tiny repetitions of the same figure in a cluster of the
bubbles. A slide of a third, even tighter detail showed with utter
clarity that the same figure was repeated perfectly in each and every
bubble facet. You could practically hear jaws dropping as a barrage of
questions came at Oglesbee from the darkened room. The photographer began to describe how the images
were created, explaining to an astonished crowd that all of them were
done in camera with a single exposure--and printed optically, with no
digital image editing. "This is what the camera saw," he said. Arnold
Newman spoke up from the front row. "You mean you didn't use any
Photoshop?" he asked. No, said Oglesbee, no Photoshop. Iooss, Schatz, and some others in the salon were so
impressed that they asked to acquire Oglesbee's photographs,
spectacular black-and-white silver prints in sizes up to 30x40 inches.
The work that wowed them is from an ambitious self-assigned project
that he calls, informally, the "Water Series." The images grew out of
both a lighting and a mechanical challenge: to find a way to photograph
water in the studio so that it looked like the surface of a pond or
stream. "I wanted to see if I could mimic the look of
naturally-occurring water in the studio, and combine it with a figure,"
says Oglesbee, who began his career in the Montgomery-Ward photo unit
and for many years shot the Light Impressions catalog. That challenge led to a thirteen-year project that
will culminate this September with the publication of Aquatique
(Insight Editions, $75), Oglesbee’s first monograph. The oversized book
will contain more than 100 quadratone images from the series that has
consumed Oglesbee’s creative ambition--not to mention his studio. That's
saying something, because Oglesbee works out of a 6,000-square-foot
1880’s dance hall in upstate Wellsville, New York. For his first attempt at shooting water in the studio, Oglesbee created
a shallow pool of water in an improvised tank, lighting up a big
reflector behind it to create the feeling of sky reflecting on the
water’s surface. He took a small fan and aimed it at the water to mimic
the effect of wind. "I was amazed," he recalls. "It looked completely
real." Then, working with a 4x5 view camera and a model posed either in
the water or above it, Oglesbee set to work. About nine or ten shots into the series, a chance
observation radically expanded the scope of the experiments. Oglesbee
made an oversized enlargement of a photo with a cluster of bubbles in
it, and discovered tiny images of the model refracted in the bubbles'
surfaces. "My reaction was 'Oh my God!'," he recalls. "I didn't see
them when I was shooting, or even in the 11 x 14-inch prints." Bubbles
immediately became a central focus of the series. The bubble effect was most dramatic, Oglesbee
realized, when the bubbles were just one layer thick, and achieving
that was a challenge. "It took a lot of experimenting," he says. "It
involves compressed air coming out of multiple nozzles." And while the
photographer won’t reveal all of his bubbly modus operandi, he says
that controlling the lighting is key. "If you take a bunch of suds, put
it between the camera and the subject, and only illuminate the figure,
then you get all these little images floating in blackness." Creating such an effect takes well-honed
problem-solving skills. Indeed, any time Oglesbee has encountered a
visual riddle he couldn't solve with existing gear, he has created his
own--including complex, sophisticated shooting tables and light stands.
(He even manufactures his own line of gear, called the Oglesbee Studio
System, which you can learn about at photoheaven.com.) He did likewise
for the Water Series, building elaborate setups that would accommodate
not just water but a human being. All of the Water Series shots are made, by
necessity, with Polaroid Type 55 Positive/Negative film, which produces
a top-quality negative in addition to an instant print. "You have to be
able to monitor what is happening because a lot of it is choreography,"
he says. "You have to consider both the pose and the movement of the
water, and I might initiate some wave that has to bounce off the other
end of the tank and come back before I shoot." It often takes the
photographer many days to complete each image, since all its complexity
is achieved on set, not with digital manipulation. Oglesbee has grown
accustomed to the assumption, even by experienced photographers, that
his work involves some degree of digital image-editing. Yet the fact
that he simply photographs "what the camera sees" isn't necessary to
appreciate the layered mysticism of the images. Today, Oglesbee's career is more about fine art than
commercial work, which is exactly how he likes it. "My goal was always
to be an artist first and a commercial photographer second," he says.
He even chose his rural location largely so he could pursue personal
projects. "I’m out here in the middle of nowhere because I can afford
the time and space to do my artwork," he says. Now, most of Oglesbee's
earnings come from sales of prints in the Water Series, available
through both the Volakis Gallery in Yountville, California and the Fay
Gold Gallery in Atlanta. And his collectors have expanded way beyond
the membership of the NY PhotoGroup Salon, to include such photographic
connoisseurs as Sir Elton John. To see more of Oglesbee’s Water Series, including enlarged details of prints, visit Oglesbee.com.
