English poet Samuel Coleridge wrote a famous poem about an ancient mariner which includes the lines, "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Visitors to Huis Marseille which faces the Keizergracht, one of Amsterdam's principal waterways, might well think the same situation on land awaits us in the near future when they witness all the watery photos, in addition to the canal on whose banks the foundation is situated.
The Dutch nation has a love-hate relationship with water, since a considerable part of their land is polder, terrain below sea level they have worked hard to reclaim from the foaming waters on their shores. Keeping dry is no joke.
Famous for their polders and dikes assiduously managed with pumping stations, sluices, dams and bridges, the Dutch landscape is not entirely a natural one. Dutch photographers began in the nineteenth century to capture images of their harbors and waterworks. Today Marnix Goossens treats the landscapes he photographed with a contemporary eye, though with a traditional and sober outlook.
The Dutch have, as a consequence of the constant menace of invading waters, bred an intrepid nation of engineers. (They have also recently been called upon to create artificial islands off the shores of a Gulf state.) Thus the fame of the Netherlands, which means lowlands, came out of turning their natural disadvantage into an economic advantage.
Together with the Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, the Rijksmuseum has organized its eleventh photographic exhibition, "Rising waters: Marnix Goossens photographs Dutch ways to stay dry". The national museum has put on display one photographer's participation in the annual Document Nederland photography project.
The Dutch are developing a new relationship with the water they encounter at home in response to constant warnings about the problems climate change may bring: rising sea levels, flooding rivers, subsidence and too much rainwater.
For this exhibition, Dutch photographer Marnix Goossens -- born in 1967 and trained at the Utrecht School of the Arts and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, a private academy for the illustrated arts -- photographed sites undergoing preparations for the coming waters.
Goossens traveled throughout the Netherlands documenting places where the effects of rising sea levels is already visible or where it will soon exert its influence. One of his subjects is a lowered weir island in the Rhine river at Driel which allows water to flow through experimental mounds made of dredged material from the Klompenwaard nature reserve.
Other areas have been designated to allow for future flooding, returning them, as it were, to the sea. Ten "weak links" have been identified along the coastal dunes. In some places, the dunes are being removed to allow seawater to flow inland within limits.
Elsewhere, for instance at Noordwijk, trailing suction hopper dredgers are replenishing the foreshore, maintaining existing defenses. It is now hard to find a province or city without a water-related project.
Huis Marseille is sponsoring two presentations on the theme of water in photography through March 1, 2009. The shows' curator says their efforts are meant as a counterpoint and supplement to the Rijksmuseum show.
The Huis Marseille exhibit begins with a select retrospective of water-related photography compiled from the Rijksmuseum's rich trove, with works by J.G. Hameter, F.J. von Kolkow, Henri de Louw and the photographic house of Arnaud Pistoor and Zoon. These past lenses are juxtaposed against a contemporary view of water as a phenomenon and source of inspiration by a group of international photographers. Twentieth-century artists included are Carol Blazer, Eva Besnyo and Wim Brusse, as well as Germaine Krull with her striking geometric views of the famous Rotterdam bridge.
There are even photos taken on the beach at Scheveningen by German soldiers during the Second World War and amateur photos round out the historical section.
Water has not only inspired photographers who hail from lands beholden to the ocean, but also, for example, Burkhard (1944) from land-locked Switzerland. Japanese photographers, Naoya Hatakeyama and Syoin Kajii, and the U.S. photographer Roni Horn are also fascinated by this theme. Their contributions point out universal aspects of water and its symbolic portent.
After looking over both exhibitions, one striking difference does stand out. The documentary, depictive styles of Marnix Goossens and predecessors show deceptively calm waters while others, like Burkhard and company, portray their subjects of the sea, rivers or waterfalls as churning, often threatening, phenomena.
Asako Narahashi (1959), for example, waterproofs her camera and stands or swims in the churning sea to shoot her views of sea-locked land. Hatakeyama (1958) uses the canal which runs through Tokyo almost as a theatrical backdrop. Meanwhile Kajii (1976), a monk who lives on the island of Sado, presents meditative views. Horn (1955), who spent much time in Iceland, observes the Thames.
Remembering that last year's BMW-Paris Photo prize centered on the notion of wateras well, it does indeed merit meditating about the extreme importance of water in our planet's make-up, both socially and physically. Even ourselves, our physical bodies actually consist of more than 60 per cent water, locked within our cells.
So the relevance of these visions of water in photography is extremely pertinent to the public, not only photo connoisseurs. It would be edifying for the Huis Marseille shows to travel to the archipelago of Indonesia whose national anthem uses the phrase "tanah air" (literally "water land") to mean motherland.
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