The exuberant beauty of Brian Oglesbee's Aquatique springs from its fascinated joy in creation. Its photos flow with energy as abundantly as with water. The universe and the images themselves are born together; the workings of imagination and its outcomes appear simultaneously. Human figures create the world and come into being at the same time; they are goddesses and gods, and the spawn of gods and goddesses; they are feminine and androgynous; they are at once themselves in particular and all humanity collectively. Aquatique fuses its archetypal images with those of everyone who dreams. True to the special capabilities of photography, Oglesbee's camera meticulously records all that exists before it and makes visible the All in which it exists.

Life begins in rebirth, for life is replication; and understanding begins with perceiving again, in recognition. Creation, then, must be re-creation (and, happily, recreation).

Absent stories or allusions, Oglesbee's photographs nonetheless feel intensely mythic. All depict metamorphosis, the fluid exchange between self and other, one and many, now and then. Irving Massey wrote that metamorphosis is the process through which one "is reborn by himself" a process of change essentially unaccompanied by language." Oglesbee has said of his work, "The picture begins where the words leave off." Aquatique renders rebirth visible; we see without linguistic mediation the inexplicable, inevitable process of becoming (what Massey called "the form in which our encroachment on the future is made tangible."

In making these pictures, Oglesbee goes where the motives of creation lead, where the spirit moves. Like Edward Weston, an early influence, Oglesbee meditates on energy and a universe in which form and force are one. A color still-life that he made in the early 1980s bears the title of the physicists' Holy Grail, "Grand Unification." The bubbles and ripples of Aquatique provide images for the idea from quantum theory that in a void matter and energy wink spontaneously into and out of being. In Aquatique existence is a constant coming-out and trying-out, the expression not of destiny but of limitless possibility.

Direction-dimension in Oglesbee's photographs(as in the time just after the Big Bang) is as nascent as matter-energy; over, under, around, and through are not yet wholly distinct.

The subjects of Aquatique are grand, cosmic. The prints, therefore, need to be big. They also need to be big because they contain multitudes at every scale. The fractal repetitions of Oglesbee's pictures stretch from the grain of sand in which Blake saw the universe to the strings of galaxies that are at present the farthest we can see.

Pure water can be seen only when it is stirred by gravity or impinging movement, which it in return makes visible. As with the creator and the created, energy and matter, the dancer and the dance, the visual equivalence between motion and water is entire and perfect.

The waters of Aquatique are the waters of life. Water is the most paradoxically enduring of humanity's symbols of change. Life is change, and you can never step again into the same stream you are crossing now. Water sweeps across, under, around, over, and through all boundaries. It refracts, reflects, and transmits light; it is the "universal solvent." Babies and most other earthly creatures swim into existence in a rich amniotic bath. Metaphorically, the fluidity and capaciousness of water more than equals its physical flow. It is the mind itself, "that ocean," Marvell wrote, "where each kind/ Does straight his own resemblance find."

Like imagination, water unifies and synchronizes the multiplicities of matter, energy, space, and time. Oglesbee's photos achieve grand unification by revealing deeply shared identities without effacing differences; their elements are permeable to each other, not merely "like."

Oglesbee's photos comprehend experience simultaneously from outside and inside, on the level, from above, and from below. Aquatique imagines a universe not of either/or but of both/and. Among spirit, matter, and energy, Aquatique assumes an intimate connection. It shows us as human in the universe and the universe as human. Divinity signifies identity: I am the world and the world is me. Human in form, the gods of Oglesbee's photos are the remnants of original creation that can still be discovered in us. They are at once the shape of the Big Bang and its latest outcome. The fluid interchanges between the human and the cosmic are snapshots of the metamorphoses through which everything exists.

Oglesbee's pictures picture picture-making. Like all works of art that enlarge us and our world, they meditate upon their means as well as their meanings. The two prove so closely related as to be scarcely distinguishable. Aquatique ingeniously exploits the resources of view camera, lighting and set, human form, black-and-white film and paper. The vertical orientation of the prints crops our peripheral vision and puts the image in the middle of our sight, the acutest visual field, while the central placement of the figures further sharpens our focus on them.

The photos of Aquatique reward, indeed require, viewing distances from well back to very close. Fine detail and large design have equal importance. Oglesbee's pictures represent not only the truth of Lisette Model's idea that the more specific a photo is the more universal its meanings will be, but they also show one of the means (the object merging into its underlying form) through which that paradox may come to be true.

Without exception, the photos of Aquatique have the integrity conferred by unmanipulated printings of single, unretouched negatives. They figure forth photography's uniquely powerful grip on time, its ability at once to vividly represent change and to stop it. Unusually, however, Oglesbee's work captures not the moment in which present becomes past, but the instant that joins the present with the time to come, "the form in which our encroachment on the future is made tangible."

In all the prints of Aquatique, waves of water and light, bubbles, groupings of foliage and stones embrace figures whose gestures in turn shape their surroundings. Fertile waters bring the world and its spirits into existence, just as solutions of exotic chemicals give substance to the latent images of photosensitive film and paper.

Because he understands and securely controls his art, Oglesbee can afford to grant his photographic muses considerable autonomy. "I'm where I want to be," he has said, "when I'm where the picture takes over, where it dictates what gets done." The spirit of the photo arises from interaction between the "facilitator" (the artist) and the work that participates in its own making. Part of that interaction includes bountiful play with what Oglesbee calls "literal truth and poetic truth." The photographs record without alteration what was within the field of view of the lens when they were exposed, but the worlds Oglesbee creates(often as elaborately constructed and illuminated as small movie sets(are designed to be paradoxical and richly expressive.

Complete and self-sufficient, Oglesbee's photographs ask only for thoughtful, engaged viewing. Among the aspects of Aquatique that await fuller discussion is the deftly paired sense of simultaneous wit and threat that presides, mildly but pervasively, in many of its images. Disturbances in the water and softening focus threaten dissolution. At the same time, the distortions of bubble, ripple, and soft-focus have the comic appeal of fun-house mirrors.

None of Oglesbee's photographs are without threatening, ironic, and comic elements. Such perspectives, however, neither pervade them nor predominate. Rather, Aquatique has an objectivity, an innocent straightforwardness, that is characteristic of both the most primitive, simple art and the most sophisticated. Its photographs advance the expressive range of their medium while returning to and renewing the profoundest themes of all lasting meditations: life and consciousness, love, the sometimes grotesque beauty of humankind, the divinity of creation, the paradoxes and predicaments of being human in a world that simultaneously is and is not us.

(Lesley Brill has published essays on the photos of Arbus, Atget, and Brett Weston and books on the films of Hitchcock and John Huston. He teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit.)

Enter the Water Series I gallery