MAGAZINE - Brian Oglesbee

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WS-06
Photographer
BRIAN OGLESBEE
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J
WS-65
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ulie Taymor, the
genius behind Broadway’s
Spiderman, Lion King
and a dozen other smash
theatrical hits made a
pilgrimage to New York
state’s least populated
county, Allegany. She
journeyed there to witness
firsthand the ingenious
photographic work of Brian
Oglesbee, in particular, the
Aquatique images from his
Water Series photographs.
Her team was stymied:
how could Oglesbee
achieve such wondrous
effects? Were they, in
fact, computer facilitated?
The images, displaying a
combination of artifacts
taken from nature, textiles
and water with female
figures floating just below
or above them, intrigued
Team Taymor.
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Brian ‘s Water Series was a
tremendous inspiration in the
conception of my film of THE
TEMPEST. His surreal play
with nature and the human form
is not only visually exquisite but
quite mysterious and moving.
Amazingly, it is shot without
any digital or visual effects
enhancement, and thus it has a
true visceral feel while the play
of lighting on the figures and the
elements is magical.
Director Julie Taymor, speaking about
the images in ‘Aquatique: Photographs by
Brian Oglesbee’
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WS-109, WS-127
Georg Friedrich Handel’s Water Music should be
playing when one views the images in Brian Oglesbee’s
monograph, Aquatique. The large black and white
images, many of them full bleed, reproduced on excellent,
heavy paper, depict several female models seemingly
in or above water, their faces and bodies distorted:
romantic, spectral, ecstatic, glamorous and slightly
disturbing, these water nymphs are compelling. They
are transformational, lingering between earth and the
beyond. Distorted, they appear sometimes as phantoms,
sometimes as angels, nereids, the water goddesses, in
Greek mythology, helpful to sailors. WS-74 and WS-127
encapsulates elements of all of the above.
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WS-116
Other Oglesbee images, WS95-7 2004 and WS-96 2004
recall the Shroud of Turin.
Julie Taymor’s favorite image,
WS-65 2001 summons the
Demon Barber of Fleet Street
in Sweeney Todd: within
her office it was present
as the cover image for the
screenplay of The Tempest.
The archsurreal image, WS13 1995, chosen by Eastman
House for their permanent
collection, would enthrall
Dali and Teilhard du Chardin.
Three hands surround a
seemingly floating stone,
the latter surreal, the former,
set just above the center of
the image, evokes Chardin’s
belief that God is at the heart
of the matter, in stones and
minerals, as much as in the
soul. However much these
images might have occurred
by chance and/or design, the
visual results are pregnant with
metaphor and meaning.
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Part of a triptych
WS-100
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Distorted, they appear
sometimes as phantoms,
sometimes as angels,
nereids, the water
goddesses, in Greek
mythology, helpful
to sailors.
Part of a triptych WS-100
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Part of a triptych WS-100
Demonstrably, one of Oglesbee’s
masterworks, WS-06 1995,
depicts a woman, head
emerging, upside down, from the
bottom of the image, her left hand
extended towards us behind her
head, her right hand poised to
emerge just below a ripple in the
water’s surface. Three stones,
randomly placed, remind us of
ideal groupings in Japanese
gardens or the Trinity. Could the
hand be stretching out to touch
the tripartite God? The subject’s
eyes, clear and compelling, are
rolled back towards her forehead,
viewing us, calmly, ethereally; her
lips appear parted. As in so many
of these images, twigs, branches
and leaves appear like nature’s
lace at river’s edge. The model’s
apparently long hair and her body
extending out, floating just below
the water recalls classic PreRaphaelite imagery: John Everett
Millais’ famous Ophelia, now in
the Tate, depicting Shakespeare’s
character from Hamlet singing
just before she drowns, her, at
first air-borne clothes having
become waterlogged.
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The flanking angels
support an archangel, an
emissary from the Almighty,
holding in her aquaborne
hands an energy, never
dying, eternal, forever.
CH
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Above: triptych
WS-100
Both Millais and Oglesbee, along with Shakespeare,
evoke images central to the ancient belief that springs,
lakes, streams and rivers afford access to the gods,
through the chalice and host, transubstantiation and
rebirth, or on Charon’s raft on the River Styx, a conveyance
to the world beyond the mortal. Recall, that in the Mayan
world, a giant stone was rolled, submerged in a spring
at a crucial moment in the moon’s passage, thereby
connecting the earth and celestial deities. Oglesbee’s
photographs speak to fertility, health and prosperity; the
leaves, as the decaying logs in Hudson River paintings
did, remind us of a transient, transformational narrative.
The triptych comprising WS-31 1999 on the viewer’s
left and WS-33 1999 on the right with WS-100.3 #17
2005 in the center presents an image of the eternal. The
flanking angels support an archangel, an emissary from
the Almighty, holding in her aquaborne hands an energy,
never dying, eternal, forever. These images speak of a
world beyond the temporal, a forever world, in contrast
to the transience of other images, however spiritually
charged.
Oglesbee joins an historic line of architects, garden
designers, artists, photographers and cinematographers
who have employed water as both striking formal element
and metaphor. Mogul and French water gardens and
modern day pools and showers surely inspire Oglesbee.
A plethora of earlier photographers and cinematographers
engage H20 as creative and metaphorical device: think
of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene in Psycho
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WS-41
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or, in a more sensuous vein, Herb Ritts’ watered-down
models. In WS-104 2006 Oglesbee joins significant
artists in portraying the human figure as literally upright,
free-standing water font, but with his own remarkable
twist. As in all of these images, one asks, “how did he
do it?” That is his secret, for the viewer to ponder. All
of this work derives from the pre-digital, silver print era,
including those later printed digitally.
Brian Oglesbee celebrates the female figure as water
goddess, celebrating her form, her timeless connection
to the sea in numerous ways: romantic, tragic, powerful
and triumphant, as in Venus rising from the sea, seen in
WS-16 1997 and WS-17 1997. Although possessing
triste overtones, there is a persistence and steadfastness
within his images; they form an integral part of the fabric
of life, virtually, in some instances, what appears to be
the hide, as in 1999.
Stephen Tennant would have loved Oglesbee’s work;
surely, Jean Cocteau, like Taymor is, would be fascinated,
immediately engaging him as he did Lucien La Clergue, at
Picasso’s suggestion, to document his cinematographic
art. There is about Oglesbee’s art an atmosphere that
would have been appealing to those lively souls who
populated the interwar years, the Bloomsbury crowd in
England and the Paris visionaries.
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There is freedom in Oglesbee’s work: a life fully
engaged artistically. There is liberation, not so much
like that found in Kenneth Anger’s avant garde film,
Eau d’Artifice but in that found in a life assiduously
lived in Allegany County. H Christopher Hyland
WS-40
Brian Oglesbee
+1 (917) 796-6548
b@oglesbee.com
114 Jefferson Street, Wellsville, NY 14985 USA
Aquatique: Photographs by Brian Oglesbee
ISBN-10: 1933784172
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