All images courtesy of Bartolomeo Celestino and Perimeter Editions
Photographer Bartolomeo Celestino has spent the past five years returning to the same ocean-facing cliff face and taking pictures of the churning waves below. The result is Surface Phenomena, a photo book that catalogues a treacherous secret surf spot near Bronte, New South Wales in a series of uniquely macro shots. It’s landscape photography, minus the horizon.
Speaking to The Creators Project, Celestino explains the risky business of photographing the ocean up close. “I jump a fence from the road, climb down an embankment, and push myself through a small hole in a hurricane fence to a small isolated cliff ledge that juts out above the ocean,” he says. “I’m literally floating above the ocean. I try not to think about that too much.”
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At first, the Surface Phenomena project was purely inspired by aesthetics. But as he amassed a larger body of work, Celestino became fascinated with the allegorical power of nature’s violence.“You can quickly quantify and witness how brutal and unforgiving nature can be,” he says. “How incessant unsustainable progress, neo right wing economic policy, population growth and pollution are rapidly changing our climate….storms which were once described as once-in-a-lifetime phenomena are now more regular than the majority care to acknowledge.”
Ironically those same conditions create extraordinarily beautiful photographs, and Celestino points out that we’re inclined to avoid conversations about climate change when its effects are so awe-inspiring. “Nature can produce storms with an ability to cause social amnesia,” he says. “They are simply hypnotic.”As the Surface Phenomena project continued, it naturally took on more of a political significance. “It took on a new depth when SIEV 221 sunk off Christmas Island in 2014,” Celestino says. “The process of actually creating theses images became a kind of therapy. The waves became a surface that projected our history, fear and guilt.”
Flick through the pages of Surface Phenomena and you’ll become hypnotised by subtle changes in the ocean’s exterior. “There’s a strange kind of communication that occurs with the repetitive nature of the imagery,” Celestino says. “Subtle changes in tone, detail and volume have lead me away from the literal illustrative value of the images.”
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