Michael Massaia’s “The Pull” portfolio of inverted oceanscapes, are elegantly simple photographs; a visual meditation, if you will. Ethereal and enigmatic, tapping into the feelings of nature’s primordial forces, the images in this portfolio show the phenomena of what happens to the sky and the foreground when their orientation remains reversed, just as it’s seen on the view camera’s ground glass before capture! It’s so easy to get lost inside of the endless details of waves crashing and their trails returning to the sea. They embrace, beckon and “pull” you into them to experience the calm within the storm of movement they create. Reminiscent of the movies taken of surfers in the curl of the wave, everything around them moving, but with a certain calm equanimity present in the curl for a brief moment, that could be an eternity. Reminiscent of the ab-ex period in painting and Rothko in particular, this sublime beautiful work is all the more compelling since every photographer in history using a view camera to capture oceanscapes has seen this. They didn’t realize the resultant magical, mysterious drama of leaving the images oriented as composed on the camera’s ground glass!
View the Portfolio Below:
