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I wanted to picture what goes on under the surface of Regent’s Canal, the heaps of shopping trolleys thrown from bridges, the stream of random packaging waste exhibiting Londoner’s patterns of consumption, mixed together with a crude ecosystem of algae and primitive fish. When trying to photograph this underwater life, I quickly realized my problem: What I was seeing was not just the things below water, but also the reflection of the world above, and it was the latter, to my unluck, that shone with more power in the pictures. This should all be glaringly obvious, but it was not my intuitive first feeling when peering below the surface. My mind fixated on the submerged thing, I ignored all other stimulus as unrelevant. With the image that was shown on my camera screen, having passed the lense and a serious of digital transformations, I could not perform the same trick of picking up only the object of my attention. The result looked more like a confused overlapping collage of unrelated images. It took a while of disordered walking and perplexed tilting of my head before I came to terms with how changes in my perspective affected simultaneously both my underwater target and the reflected mirror image of something else far away.

Photography is an abstracting medium. It records a trace of an object, and in doing so, inevitably simplifies it, reduces it to some of its visual ualities. This simplification is in many cases key to what makes a photo beautiful. It can start from an everyday object, and bring out and emphasize something about what it looks like: The staircase becomes a spiral of amazing regularity, the flower a perfect geometric construct, and so forth. (This is for a large part what makes black and white photography distinctively beautiful. The marked reduction of colors strengthen the impression that you are no longer looking at the object nor its pure representation. It distances us from the thing and elevates the picture to a visual object in its own right.) Or in my case, the surface of a canal becomes an abstract mishmash of jumping colours.

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