Deanna Templeton

The Swimming Pool is a new photographic essay from California-based street photographer Deanna Templeton (born 1969) that departs from her usual style to offer an expressive, intimate view of the human form underwater. The series was born after an impromptu nude swimming-pool shoot of husband and artist Ed Templeton, which spurred an eight-year journey in the study of light, expression and the enigma of water. Shooting entirely on color and black-and-white film and Polaroid, Templeton sent friends into the pool to be photographed in their truest form. Unlike her street photography, in which subjects were often strangers, Templeton found that creating these portraits required more intimacy and connection—a feeling that is apparent throughout every image in the series, which show strong, liberated individuals, confident and at ease in their most beautiful and vulnerable moments. As Ed Templeton writes in his afterword to this volume, "the nude swimmer is floating in a void of quiet solitude, the gentle pressure of being underwater enclosing her form like a baby in a womb and nothing exists outside of this world. A lone figure amidst a sea of blues and greys and frenetic sunlight performing a solitary dance for the photographer above, choosing movements and directions, twisting and swooping, contorting and expelling breaths painting a picture of form and light together." The Swimming Pool offers a deep and inspiring view of the human form.

For the past five years, Deanna Templeton has been photographing skateboard demonstrations, surfing competitions and other beachside congregations of kids in southern California. The photographs in Scratch My Name on Your Arm document a sexy trend emerging in Californian youth culture for getting famous surfers and skaters to autograph bare skin and underwear. Where once the autograph of an idol served primarily as a souvenir or keepsake (a scribble in a diary, on a poster or T-shirt), nowadays autographs on skin or intimate underwear have become the preferred method for drawing the attention of both the autographer and bystanders to one's scantily-clad self. In Scratch My Name on Your Arm, Templeton's black-and-white photographs record both an ephemeral form of calligraphy and body art and the burgeoning customs and styles of a subculture in the making.