Untitled #6 (Catskill, NY, USA) 2006 by Carlo Van de Roer

Carlo Van de Roer
Currently residing in Brooklyn, NY

Website
www.carlovanderoer.com

Work Statement

I am interested in the landscape as a recreational and social space. Swimming pools and the sea dominate much of my work, as I attempt to examine and reconnect with the environments that surrounded me growing up in a small coastal community.
This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools that have been drained or abandoned.
When full, the surface of a swimming pool is a flat continuation of the pool edge, obscuring what is below the surface. When drained, the depths are revealed -- allowing us to examine the empty pool postmortem.
These locations were once bustling social environments, and visiting them was a collective, public experience. Now deserted by swimmers, the experience of visiting these pools is solitary, still and private. Some have become bogs, homes or gardens -- new lives that often go unobserved. Photographing them can be a voyeuristic and dark experience. I have focused on an intimate view of these locations, using tight crops which also emphasize the absent, making these photos as much about what is not there as what is there.

Bio

Carlo Van de Roer was born in 1975 in New Zealand, where he received his BFA in photography from Victoria University. Since leaving New Zealand in 1999, Van de Roer has traveled and photographed extensively in countries throughout Central America, Asia, Europe and the United States. He currently lives in New York.