The Swimming Pool
A sensuous book of photographs by Deanna Templeton
Deanna Templeton is a street photographer in Orange County, California. “This is my home,” she says. “Orange County, actually Huntington Beach, is where I was born and where my parents are laid to rest. I have many memories from here, and photography is a way for me to stay connected with my past.”
The Swimming Pool is a project that arose from an impromptu shoot by Templeton of her husband, Ed, swimming nude in their pool. (Ed is also a photographer and painter—and a professional skateboarder and founder of the skateboard company, Toy Machine—and they have been together since their teens, nearly 30 years ago.) What inspired her, Templeton says, was “seeing Ed swim around, nude and free, and my own experience of swimming, the quietness of being underwater.” Completing the book took about eight years, using friends as models in her pool at home. “I would only shoot in the summertime when I had more direct overhead sunlight to work with,” Templeton says. “I think I needed the eight years of shooting; the more I shot, the more I knew what I was and wasn’t looking for.”
The result, a book of photographs published by Um Yeah Arts in June, is ineffably personal yet exquisitely abstract. Perhaps Ed Templeton puts it best, in his afterword for The Swimming Pool: “The nude swimmer is floating in a void of quiet solitude, the gentle pressure of being underwater enclosing her form like a baby in a womb and nothing exists outside of this world. A lone figure amidst a sea of blues and greys and frenetic sunlight performing a solitary dance for the photographer above, choosing movements and directions, twisting and swooping, contorting and expelling breaths painting a picture of form and light together.”
