Water

Camille McOuat

2024 — France

About this series

Blow out all the air. Sink. Let the ripples flatten out. Then we can begin.
Below the surface, those first seconds are suspended: muffled sound, weightless comfort, the illusion of safety. A return to some distant memory of floating, protected and held. But just as you begin to drift into peace, the reminder arrives sharp and urgent: you’ll die down here. 
Don’t ever get too comfortable.
From above, the surface twists everything into fractured shapes. Without the camera, it’s difficult to notice just how bizarre bodies look beneath the water — faces lengthened, limbs bending in ways that seem impossible. I once studied perceptual continuity, which can be summed up like this: the world is strange, but your brain tidies it up. Otherwise, you’d be overwhelmed by useless detail. 
Photographing through refraction makes that strangeness visible again. The water exaggerates what is always true — that perception is not a mirror of reality but a story we’re constantly telling ourselves.

Photographer: Camille McOuat
Nationality: French
Based in: Paris, France
Website:  camillemcouat.com
Instagram: @camillemcouat

Exhibitions
Altrove exhibition, Palazzo Martinengo Cesaresco, Brescia, Italie 2019
You Must Not Stand in One Place, the Distillery Gallery, Boston 2019
PLX Art Fair + Auction, Stockholm 2017
WeWalls Art Fair, Tel Aviv 2016
Yoni at OFR, Paris 2016
New Photography, ALAN Istanbul, Istanbul, 2015
It was so beautiful I died, Comptoirs Arlesiens, Arles 2014