American Waters

Lest this blog become a vapid cesspool of late night television commercial mockery (actually that doesn't sound too bad) and not a forum for all things American and occasionally artsy, i thought i'd feature Alex Kirkbride's project "American Waters." Kirkbride took 3 years to travel over 100,000 miles in an Airstream trailer to photograph underwater images from all 50 states, from Elvis Presley's Graceland swimming pool to a cow's water tank in Kansas. He even got a guy with the last name Cousteau to write the introduction, something i had no idea was still currently possible.






from the introduction:

The results demonstrated how extraordinarily diverse underwater images could be. There was an impressionistic image of a cottonwood tree from New Mexico, an antique dentist's chair from Indiana, and an ore cart from a flooded mine in Missouri. I began to think about what else I might find on a lengthy trip around the country and how it might make a unique collection of images - a portrait of America from a fish's point of view, or a crocodile's, or a turtle's eye in a desert spring. It would be an enormous challenge to capture images expressive of American waters from coast to coast - a feat no one had ever attempted before...

Any body of water was fair game, so the quest for images led to diving and snorkelling in the most bizarre places, especially when it came to fresh water. Rivers, creeks, streams, lakes, springs, marshlands, caves, swamps, and wetlands were all explored. The expedition went to the source of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, and I even lay in a puddle in New York City. In Massachusetts at harvest time, I jumped into a flooded cranberry bog - cranberries being one of the few truly native fruits in the USA - to the great bewilderment of the farmers. For Kansas, when the time came to photograph cattle in some aquatic situation, I spoke to my friend Rob, the only person I knew from the Heartland State, the geographical centre of the contiguous United States. Rob's father put me in contact with a rancher, whose foreman didn't think my notion too far-fetched - until I asked to jump into the cows' water tank.