Photographer's Profile

Shingo Ohta

Japan

to waves, foam, spray, light and darkness. I am not interested in recording the sea as landscape. I am searching for the instant when water ceases to look like water and begins to suggest something larger: matter, cells, bodies, mythical beings, planets, or the birth and collapse of a universe. COSMIC OCEAN grew from this sustained observation. During winter storms and changing light, I use a telephoto lens and fast shutter speeds to isolate fractions of a second that normally disappear before the eye can fully perceive them. Through framing, timing, color and tonal control, I emphasize forms that already exist within the movement of the sea rather than imposing a predetermined image upon it. The sequence presented here follows an imagined cycle of creation. It begins in darkness and formless matter, moves through the emergence of particles, life, body and consciousness, reaches myth and divinity, and finally dissolves again into abyss and stardust. For me, the sea is both a physical reality and a threshold to another scale of existence. The same forms can evoke microscopic life and cosmic space, birth and destruction, the ancient and the unknown. Through these photographs, I hope viewers will momentarily forget that they are looking at waves and encounter the sea as a place where cosmos, life and myth are continuously being created.