Every year I break loose from portraiture and have an art show. Every show breaks boundaries of what’s been done with photography as art. This year’s subject is water. Tiny water sculptures smaller than your little finger, vanishing in less time than it takes you to blink but enlarged to an immersive and mesmerising scale.
Trip takes you to another world.
The show includes one-off pieces embellished with sparkling diamonds, gold and blood.
Water is a fantastic subject for a photographer as water is a lens. Our eyes are mainly water. Water will pick up all the colours and shapes around it.
My art takes you to another world. Trip exists within tiny intervals of space and time beyond the experience of humans. A water collision resembles an explosion or under different circumstances a solid glass vessel.
Water is colourless. To add colour, some photographers use dyes but that means they lose water’s natural sparkle and lensing effects. With pure white light, random tones from the room are picked up, which doesn’t look attractive.
I found using coloured lights, mainly blue tones, worked best. The first four pictures below are close in terms of colour to the original. Subsequent pictures were created by swapping the blue tones for other colours in Photoshop.
Five powerful studio lights illuminated the subject for around 1/50,000 second and the lights were carefully positioned to create different effects. 1/50,000 second is an unimaginably brief duration – blinking your eye takes 10,000 times longer. Electronically controlled water pumps enabled the size and intervals between the drops to be controlled precisely.
This is the first art show using these techniques printed at high resolution and huge scale.
Max Marshall Studio, Grove House, 27 Hammersmith Grove, London W6 0NE
www.maxmarshall.art
Oct 1 – Dec 31 2025