Where Waters Meet, 2019

[2.31 atmospheres]
[3.75 atmospheres]
[3.35 atmospheres]
[2.98 atmospheres]
[3.93 atmospheres]
[3.66 atmospheres]
[3.18 atmospheres]
[3.43 atmospheres]
[3.70 atmospheres]
[3.98 atmospheres]
[3.77 atmospheres]

Anticlockwise from the right

Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth paper

In his photographic series Where Waters Meet, Charrière captures the ghostly apparitions of naked free divers descending into the abyss of aquatic caves in Mexico known as cenotes. As the divers’ bodies penetrate the chemocline— an obscure and uncanny layer of bottom water full of sulfurous bacteria—they appear to dissolve in both pictorial and metaphorical terms, sinking not only toward the seafloor but into their psyches, entering a state of togetherness with their surroundings which Sigmund Freud described as the oceanic feeling—of being bound with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself. It was a primal sensation which Freud believed may underpin the human longing for transcendence; similarly, the iconographic subconscious conjures up a sea of metaphorical allusions when looking at Where Waters Meet.

The series figures both this metaphysical dive and the physical descent by the divers themselves. For the latter, water emerges not as an environment, but as a mirror—one that reflects only to a limit, before turning to absorption.

The divers first encounter themselves on this liquid surface, meeting their own gaze on its fluid veneer, only to pass beyond it and leave the familiar image behind. Here they enter a realm where only the pressured depth remains. The ocean, then, becomes not merely a backdrop for the oceanic feeling, but its very embodiment—a space where self and world blur.

By depicting the chemocline, the series contributes to a picture of the oceanic system that has grown significantly more complex in recent decades, where such worlds within worlds are relatively recent discover­ies. As we come to better understand the sea, domains from evolutionary theory through to climate science are being quietly transformed. Sliding into this previously silent (unseen and unthought) realm, Charrière’s free divers seem caught in some kind of a dance; a graceful fall. From where— and to what?