Waters and Water
2025 Premiere, Bean Plant Studio, Greeley, Colorado
Review Essay by David Caldwell
Waters and Water is the vision of photographer Laura Krauss, who worked in tandem with Lydia Krauss, her daughter, and with Asa W., an eight-year-old newcomer to the craft. A single shared camera provided the common ground for this multigenerational trio of photographers located in three different geographical locations. Laura Krauss photographed water in Southern California. Using the same camera, Lydia Krauss found her subject matter in the interior waters of Alaska. Asa W.’s location in the South Platte River Valley of Colorado allowed the inclusion of images of fresh water in the middle of the continent. Their individual photographs, combined with the joint use of the same apparatus and the participants’ collaborative curation of the resulting images, create an exhibit that both reflects and substantively embodies the very nature of the planet’s liquid element.
The exhibition’s title establishes the clear linkage between particular waters and the concept of water in general. Whether in the form of salt water or freshwater, the planet’s hydric sustenance cycles constantly through fluid, evaporative and precipitative stages. Even a stagnant body of inland water will conceivably contribute to distant sea levels through the transformative shape shifting of evaporation, precipitation, and ocean-bound streams. The tripartite strategy underlying Waters and Water likewise creates a fluid intermixing of photographic work. After film processing and curation, images from the same camera held in three different sets of hands found confluence at the Bean Plant Studio. Gallery director Susan Herold, who curated the images submitted to the studio, separated them into three separate viewing spaces. Consistent with the inevitable intermingling of water from different sources, each of the individual rooms features the work of all three photographers. Like water emanating from different places, images that originated apart from one another intermix in new configurations that the viewer can explore in each distinct space.
The unique approach deployed in Laura Krauss’s project sets the work of these photographers apart from predecessor image makers who focused on North American bodies of water. Even so, the legacies of 19th century photographers Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson help form a backdrop to Waters and Water. Both observers were attracted to mountain lakes and Western waterways. Watkins’ work up and down the Pacific coast can be seen as a blazing a trail for later photographers to follow, including the 20th century modernist Ansel Adams and 21st century visions such as those of Laura Krauss. Alfred Stieglitz’s studies of Lake George, New York in the 1920s, particularly closeup images of the water’s surface, confronted some of the same stylistic and technical issues raised by Waters and Water, seen for example in Asa W.’s closeup “Flow at the River’s Edge.”
Water has often proved to be a demanding subject for still photography. Its fluid nature is seemingly at odds with static imagery. In natural settings, however, even unmoving liquid surfaces provide challenges for a medium that is dependent upon light. While a superface may remain unchanged, illumination by temporally and atmospherically determined sunlight is in constant flux. In addition, the illumination of a transparent substance creates not only reflectivity but also the multidimensionality of depth. The ability to observe what is immersed in water, even if only momentarily, adds another challenge to the two-dimensionality of a photograph. The elusive nature of water may nudge a photographer toward underwater images or to the steady flow of motion picture photography. The former medium may take advantage of subsurface illumination but forsakes the mirror above. Predictably, however, such images are not of water itself, rather the eye of the viewer is drawn to creatures or objects located in its depths. While the challenge of fluidity can be overcome by motion picture photography, a still photograph of ocean waves, ripples on a pond, or a flowing river creates a unique contemplatable snapshot of water that is fundamentally shaped not just by natural conditions but also by human and technological variables. Waters and Water addresses the static nature of the photograph by embracing these variables, indeed by setting them in flux.
Other artistic media reflect the tendency of the still image to tug at its moorings. Painter Claude Monet’s maritime subject matter from the late 19th century comes to mind, particularly the artist’s use of broken brushstrokes to render the masts of ships. The imprecise lines resulting from this technique convey a sense of motion as the vessels respond to waves and currents. By forsaking statically precise photographic realism for impressionistic portrayal, Monet created a deliberate blurring in many of his seascapes and harbor scenes. The Waters and Water exhibit also incorporates deliberate, or at least intentionally uncorrected blurring and exploits that possibility to convey an artistic vision that differs from Monet’s intentions but shares his willingness to challenge established norms of technique.
In Monet’s case art historians have suggested that his iconoclastic approach points the way toward the authentic recording of movement by means of film photography. Not surprisingly, a fascination with moving water quickly became evident in early cinema. The work of English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge was an early link between still and moving images. Though Muybridge is best known for early motion studies, he was likewise fascinated by Western landscapes. Tellingly, many of Muybridge’s photographs feature the kinesis of nature: rivers, waterfalls and Pacific coastal waters. The trend continued with pioneer filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who headed to Niagara Falls with their camera as early as 1896. Thomas Edison filmed waterfalls in the Catskills the following year.
As with Edison and his revolutionary kinetoscope, much of the distinctiveness of the Krauss photography project is closely related to the particular technological apparatus used by the photographers. All three contributors worked with the same inexpensive Debonair camera, which has an f/8 plastic molded lens and three zone focusing options. The common choice of film among the three photographers was 120mm black and white. By choosing a simple device with unpredictably varying accuracy, the team simultaneously chose to embrace that particular level of technology and the randomness of its products. Some images, for example, Asa W.’s “Niinéniiniicíihéhe' (Flat Water River)” are challenged by the deep focus that a more advanced lens system would produce with precision. The relatively clear foreground of the image, showing riverbank grasses, lapses into less distinct mid and long ranges, giving the viewer a blurred but recognizable impression of the South Platte River and its opposite bank.
The Debonair’s potential for producing double exposures also affected the work of the photographers. Appearing first by random accident, as in Laura Krauss’s “Threatened Bull Kelp Forest,” double exposure become a deliberate feature of her image “Closed Lifeguard Station.” In the former image, the inadvertent mutation happily expanded the dimensionality of the still shot by including both the reflective surface of the water and the kelp residing below the surface.
Appropriately, the Debonair itself is on display as part of the exhibit. Its perch on a gallery pedestal is in keeping with the camera’s vital role as a fourth participant in the project, indeed as a significant shaper of the disparate pieces that combine to create a singular whole.
The photographers jointly curated the photos they selected for the premiere of Waters and Water. In the process of that collaboration, they consciously embraced the serendipity of haphazard blurring and double exposure and recognized the aesthetic value of those attributes. By doing so, the collaborators both acknowledged and overcame the limitations of their apparatus. They endowed supposed technological shortcomings with intentionality. As a further example, the viewer of Laura Krauss’s “California Dreamin’ on Such a Winter’s Day” peers into the hazy distance across a distinct surface of beach pebbles in the foreground. It is a dream-like effect.
Deep focus in other photos, notably Lydia Krauss’s “Nex’w X’aayi (Cloudberry Point),” shot in Alaska, happen to demonstrate a crisper degree of clarity. Reminiscent of the work of predecessor photographers of the American West, such as William Henry Jackson, the slightly diminished visibility of mountain peaks in the backfield of “Cloudberry Point” is the effect of distance. A comparable example from Jackson’s oeuvre is his 1874 image “Middle Fork of the Colorado River, East from Mt. Brass,” in which the top of a distant mesa lacks the sharpness of the river in the foreground.
In 2000 photographer John Fielder meticulously replicated many of Jackson’s photographs of Colorado, emulating to the best of his ability the time of day and the atmospheric conditions that affected Jackson’s images (John Fielder: Colorado 1874-2000, 2nd edition, 2015.) Fielder matched Jackson’s photograph of the Colorado River by shooting from the same overlook 126 years later. The more refined focus of his 21st-century apparatus sharpens the outline of the previously blurred mesa. Importantly, Fielder did not consider his image to be an improvement of Jackson’s earlier photograph. On the contrary, his project elevates the contributions of his predecessor and celebrates the tools with which Jackson was able to share his vision, just as it likewise embraces the capabilities of Fielder’s own more advanced equipment. In similar fashion, the considered approach of the Waters and Water project allows Lydia Krauss to convey with “Cloudberry Point” a particular beauty that is configured by an unapologetic embrace of human and technological variables.
While the deliberate use of a device that offers significant focal limitations effectively pays tribute to past imagemakers who worked productively with the technological restrictions of their day, the project also recalls popular photography. In the first half of the 20th century, the widespread availability of simple, inexpensive cameras permitted the public to make their own non-professional pictures. Such devices, many of them not unlike the Debonair, were much loved among amateur photographers whose cherished snapshots frequently included images of lakes, ocean views and mountain vistas.
At the time that cameras became convenient and affordable consumer items, imperfections in popular photography, noticeable when compared to contemporary standards, were not necessarily seen as diminishments. Instead, the results of the hobbyist’s possibly inexpert approach, combined with the unpredictable product of a basic camera, became integral parts of the scenic imagery. Importantly, the camera owner had a markedly direct influence on the nature of these images. Not only were supposed inadequacies an integral part of photographed reality, the pictures also became personal artifacts of the photographer’s vision and experience.
Personalized approaches by image makers who have different backgrounds and interests are also factors recognized and embraced by the contributors to Waters and Water. In her artist’s statement, project leader Laura Krauss, who is in her 60s, describes her “first generation” images as emphasizing “whole picture, context, and built systems.” These themes are evident, for example, in era-spanning images of the historical California landing place of early European explorers, of a modern manmade seawall, and of an abandoned lifeguard station, among others. Representing the middle generation, Lydia Krauss, who is in her 20s, pays attention to “foreground focus, textures and details.” These attributes are appropriate for her “Cloudberry Point” photograph, as well as for the richly textured image of “Pacific Blue Mussels and Acorn Barnacles,” among others. In the youngest generation that is represented on the team, Asa W., age 8, sees the motion of flowing water in response to a “raw and unfiltered stimulus.” These characteristics become evident in Asa W.’s observance of river current swirling around “Deadhead Log from 2013 South Platte River Flooding,” while the water in “South Platte River Butterfly Puddle Club” apparently remains listless but allows motion elsewhere in the environment.
Water holds universal meaning for civilizations on a planet with a mostly liquid surface. Many more cultural connections to the exhibit Waters and Water are possible, including its reflection in Asian culture. The frequent foregrounding of otherwise overlooked bodies of water, for example, as well as photographic explorations of the relationship between humans and water, remind of Daodejing and its positioning of water as a model for the Dao.
However, a more immediate and salient potential for learning from Waters and Water has to do with its collaborative, multigenerational process. The inclusion of images taken by a young amateur and the team’s inclusive collaboration in selecting images for submission to the show offer a model for other potential collectives, especially those that involve children. Exploring the creative process of photography can be supplemented by giving a team of young contributors the opportunity to collaborate among themselves also in the process of curation. The results that children agree upon among themselves, and the response to those choices by adult counterparts, will likely prove to be expansive learning experiences for participants from every generation.
Ripple effects from the innovative model created by Waters and Water are poised to touch many shores.