deanna templeton captures the perfect pleasure of skinny dipping

In her new book, The Swimming Pool (due for release through Um Yeah Arts in June), Deanna captures eight summers worth of visiting skinny dippers — friends, and later, friends of friends — suspended in the pool’s turquoise water. (Summers only, because she still hasn’t figured out how to turn on the pool’s heating system.) Like bugs in amber, the swimmers’ bodies are caught in languid momentary poses indefinitely. But far from being static, they seem to drift freely through an endless summer.

The series began eight years ago, when Ed decided to take a skinny dip one day (“he just prefers to swim nude”), and Deanna grabbed her camera from the house. “I got about 10 shots,” she says. “One, torso down, looked like a pencil drawing. It didn’t look real. A few had really interesting distortions. Not to compare my work to Francis Bacon’s but…” She liked how the sun flared off the swimmer’s body, and the unexpected ways in which the light refracted through the water. “So I started to ask friends if they’d mind coming over to take a little dip. And I knew I didn’t want bathing suits.”

read more and see images – Source: Vice I-D