Mythic Shores

Essay: David Campany analyzes historical and contemporary photographic representations of the Mediterranean Sea

- David Campany

In 1989, Hiroshi Sugimoto looked out over the Mediterranean Sea from Cassis to make one of his now-familiar seascape photographs. Shot from an elevated vantage point, the picture is half occupied by featureless water, below an equally featureless sky. No culture, no politics, no people, no land, no aircraft, no boats. Uncannily calm and eventless, the image evokes an almost-primordial past. It also invites any projections we may have of the very real facts of the sea’s present. It is hardly as if nothing happens in the Mediterranean.

Sugimoto’s photograph could hang in an exhibition about minimalism or about the cosmic spirituality of water or the fraught politics of the region. For a photograph, context is not everything but it is a lot, since the photographic image has no way of explaining what it visually describes, no way of asserting particular meanings, and no way of accounting for what might have motivated its creation. This is why photographers - and writers on photography - are often so keen to supply the missing intentions and back stories, speaking over and on behalf of that stubborn muteness, which is also a kind of radical openness. Seas are somewhat like this, too.

Even the name ‘Mediterranean’ is at once specific and elusive. Derived from the Latin