In der aktuellen Bilderserie ’Underwater Nude Rock’ präsentiert der amerikanische Fotograf Neil Craver ästhetische Aktaufnahmen unter Wasser. Seine Laufbahn als Künstler begann Craver ursprünglich als abstrakter Maler und Bildhauer, bevor er die Fotografie für sich entdeckte. Die Nudeserie zeigt nur einen Teilaspekt seines Projektes ’OmniPhantasmic’. Craver beschreibt seine Arbeit folgendermaßen:

‚This project is meant to be consumed with your emotions, and not simply perceived with your sense organs. I wanted a transcendental meaning behind them, not only with the use of chromatics and aesthetics. But with my intended focus be on the philosophical theories, I wanted a ’subliminal composition’ to create an under tow of messages to stress the strong influences of unconscious elements affecting and driving people’s lives. With the creation of a strong undercurrent of incommunicable thoughts, this will be the stage for illuminating the subconscious intellect into absolute perception.

The visual aesthetics are purely symbolic in their thought application and structure, with decomposing forests of broken memory connections and tumbling of vertigo into the correct positions of phenomenal reality. The shallowness of the area above the horizon line indicates the division of the limited amount of information consciously perceivable (atmosphere-above) and the larger mass storage of all the sense information, rationalizations and prejudices of the subconscious below (hydrosphere-below). The nexus of contingents between drowning and floating, falling and flying, dying and living are some of the main unphysical-intangible themes in this series.

A dominant temporal element of composition would be the use of the female form. I used the intrinsic values of this object to exploit and illustrate the submerged network of the unconscious condemnation and restriction of the nude form in popular society. With this formation of energies being repressed in the subconscious state, one’s behavior could start to dissolve the foundation of the self. With no outlets for expression, one could only predict the unconscious wishes could turn into anxiety and transform into synthetic states such as phobias, aggression and other maladjusted personality disorders.’

All images © Neil Craver