CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/10/2018

Suburban, exotic, utterly private, boisterously public, a threat or a blessing: 'The Swimming Pool in Photography'

This 1962 photograph of Blandine Fagedet, winner of a women's diving contest, plunging into the Piscine Georges-Vallery in Paris, is reproduced from The Swimming Pool in Photography. "It is just a tub of water, big enough to get into," Francis Hodgson writes. "But the stories come from everywhere. Out of the fears, one group of strands of history: fear of disease, fear of the industrial working class, fear of water. Out of the joys, another group of strands: the joy of immersion, of swimming itself, of skin and the hope of sex, of sun and health and leisure. Stories out of architecture and social planning: out of wealth itself. The swimming pool has been at different times and places suburban, exotic, utterly private, boisterously public, a threat or a blessing. It is, quite obviously, capable of every kind of symbolism from the rude assertion of financial status to an almost mystical fluidity of meanings that neatly complements the great puddle of chlorinated water that it holds."