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• Monterey Bay Aquarium, California, © Diane Cook and Len Jenshel
This is the second published collaboration between this husband and wife team of landscape photographers, the first having been Hot Spots: America’s Volcanic Landscape, in 1996. This time they have turned their attention to the synthetic landscape of the aquarium, visiting 25 of them in a period of over three years and across eight countries. Diane Cooke photographs in black and white, Len Jenshel in colour, and the 72 images here are sequenced carefully with typically, but not uniquely, b&w facing colour and illustrating what Cook describes as a form of theatre, ‘where the glass is a curtain, the aquarium is the stage, and the drama is acted out on both sides of the glass’. The images are, frankly, rather good fun and often humorous. The human visitors often feature peripherally, but the inmates are usually centre stage. Although the colour and black and white approaches superficially provide different perspectives on the aquarium theme, in fact they complement each other well and the sequencing throughout the book makes the most of this. Each image is a tableau in itself. There is an extensive interview at the back of the book where the photographers talk with Lawrence Weschler, recently retired from the staff of The New Yorker, in which they describe what, as photographers, makes them tick and how the aquarium project came about. Concluding the interview Cook remarks that: ‘I guess it’s ironic that we humans, who think of ourselves as being separate from nature, are the ones who try to create these artificial and perfect worlds. I’m sure some would like to think that aquaria are perfected universes, but when you look at some of these pictures, you see peeling paint and crumbling tanks’. As a project this is really well executed and the selected images undoubtedly benefit from being the work of two photographers, one in colour and one in b&w.
Aquarium: Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, published by Aperture, $45, ISBN 1 931788 21 9.
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