The Deep.(Brief Article)

In the forthcoming photographic anthology OCEANS (Rizzoli), edited by Sue Hostetler, actor and environmentalist Robert Redford writes about the sea as "a complex natural wilderness" and Jean-Michel Cousteau (son of Jacques) describes the Earth's oceans as "the big story in this solar system." But more than words or advocacy, the big story in "Oceans" is photography's ongoing, and wonderfully quixotic, attempts to fix the sea in its lens. Amid the crashing foam, delicate horizon lines, and international cast of beachcombers depicted here, unforgettable images emerge: Lynn Davis's Greenland icebergs, rising out of the desolate North Atlantic like a giant marble statuary; Rineke Dijkstra's seaside portrait of an iconically awkward teen-ager; Jock Sturges's luminous study of three nudes on an immense, mirrorlike French beach; and Hiroshi Sugimoto's enigmatic ...