By suspending the normal rules of earth-bound weight and motion, swimming pools bend certain rules of mental operation too, presenting possibilities for divine transformation and fatal transgression. Their creative potential often takes perverse and sometimes cruel forms. A Barbara Laing photograph from 1991 features a mule falling through the air towards a tank of water during ‘The World's Only High-Diving Mules Show' at the New Mexico State Fair in Albuquerque. Penned into a grandstand and shading their brows, fairgoers watch expectantly. One marvels at the bizarre freak-show machinations that brought this animal to its improbable plunge.
All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from Owens valley to Los Angeles is likened to an incestuous act of rape, still resonates. The city is now precariously fire-whipped, yet remains irrigated by dreams of oases in the desert as architectural firms woo their clients with rippling designer status symbols, above all the almost ubiquitous infinity pool that seeks to shimmer away the very boundary between earth and heaven.
Two new books invite us to reimagine the pool's evolving cultural status. Splash is a clinically luxurious boutique of contemporary pool design, in which people are almost wholly absent and there are in fact no splashes. By contrast, The Swimming Pool in Photography is an astonishingly rich album of boisterous visual pageantry, documenting those who frolicked about the pools of the 20th century.
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