PHOTOGRAPHY

Michael Dweck
Mermaid

Mermaids is a collection of dazzling photographs in which the photographer Michael Dweck explores the theme of the female nude submerged in water, and celebrates the modern mermaid, as represented by beautiful young women who appear very much at home in the water. When Dweck scouted out the Weeki Wachee Spring, as a location for his mermaids project, he met a local young beauty who had been raised in Aripeka, an island fishing village on the coast nearby, and began photographing her. And through her, Dweck met other island girls—so-called “waterbabies”— local girls who spend most of their free time underwater – and could hold their breath underwater for as long as six or seven minutes. He photographed them alone, together, and at play, but mostly at night in the depths of the Weeki Wachee River. Dweck also photographed in Montauk, Amagansett, and Miami, and the new images, while often abstracting the female body in a painterly swirl of watery refractions, celebrate the physical charm of the female form and the transformation that is achieved by the shedding of clothes and psychic baggage in the meditative isolation of the underwater world.

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