Each issue, my Lenswork subscription inspires me with incredible images and their stories, along with the stories of the photographers who make them. And so it is with marine photographer Michael Berman who is based in Port Ludlow, Washington. Mr. Berman’s work was featured in Lenswork issue 88 (May-June 2010).
Michael Berman’s sailing images are simply breathtaking.
But it’s not his sailing images that I wanted to comment on. Rather, I would like to draw your attention to his Open Ocean series that’s also available on his website. These images are in colour, though when reproduced in Lenswork they appeared in black-and-white.
I love to photograph the prairie landscape. There’s a reason why the slogan “Land of Living Skies” appears on Saskatchewan license plates. But the prairie landscape is also a real challenge because so often its landscape is nearly featureless, at least from a distance, so much so that it can be very difficult to compose a landscape photograph that has a foreground, a middle, and background.
But look at Berman’s Open Ocean images. You can hardly find a subject more “featureless” at the macro scale than the open sea. Yet Berman has created images from this featureless sea that indeed have a foreground, a background, and a middle. Look at Open Ocean 2 (18˚04N 015˚24W) as an example:
Here, Berman has created an image where the foreground is the small part of the sea directly in front of his lens, the middle is a skyline of the ocean wave ahead of his boat, and the background is a combination of the dramatic clouds and the God-rays streaming in from overhead. So the composition works. Beautifully. Here’s an excerpt from his artist’s statement, which draws parallels between the ocean and the prairie:
I made these photographs in the wilderness of the open ocean, away from the obvious influences and threats of man. They are “landscapes” of the sea. A record of a vast and open prairie of water, where one can literally see to the edge of the earth. As I moved with the sea, the horizon appeared and disappeared behind the jagged edge of the passing waves. Each wave was unique – never to be repeated – and lasting only a moment.
I am also intrigued by the mysterious riddle of place in the open ocean. On land, geographic features are permanent and allow us to recognize location. At sea, the ocean’s features are constantly changing and except for latitude and longitude we are unable to recognize or know a location.
Berman’s Open Ocean series is not only a collection of outstanding photographs.
This is genius.