World Photography Day, Ophelia, and the Importance of a Singular Print

19 August 1839 is often described as photography’s birth certificate: the day François Arago publicly disclosed Louis Daguerre’s process to the academies in Paris and the French state published the working details for general use. The announcement transformed a laboratory curiosity into a medium for science, commerce, and art; within weeks it was being practised internationally.

Nearly two centuries on, the question is no longer how to make more images, but how to make them matter in an age of endless reproductions and compulsive scrolling.

Ophelia: Turned from Heaven’s Doors

My own answer is slowness and material truth: analogue film plates of scenes created underwater, formed entirely in-camera without retouching. Working with the liquid mechanics of surface tension, refraction, and breath control, the water’s skin becomes both lens and brushstroke. Each 6×6 cm, 5×4 in, or 8×10 in plate yields a single, unrepeatable print. Since 2013, I have released only unique works, with no editions — each documented through process notes, custom lighting fabricated from recycled aluminium, studio records, and NFC authentication for provenance. These works are conceived for endurance: to be engaged with, archived, and passed through generations of custodial care.

“A hymn to a natural world under threat, set within charged architectural memory.”
— Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián, on Renaciendo

Painting with water, not software
Underwater photography is not new, yet most of its aesthetics are defined by placing the camera itself underwater. While I have worked extensively in this way, in 1995 I began exploiting the optics created by the surface tension that shapes the water’s skin. Refraction and light caustics bend light at the boundary, drawing the soft aureoles visible around faces and hands. These are not post-production effects but physical events, choreographed in real time.

Figure 1 — Witness (2012)

Figure 2 — Ophelia: Turned from Heaven’s Doors (study)

Further chapters of my practice inhabit charged architecture: first the reopening of the long-closed Convento de los Carmelitas in Budia; now the Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja in Brihuega (foundations 10th–11th century). Place is not a backdrop but a co-author, as visitors ascend through the cemetery — a ritual passage from memento mori to renewal — before entering the images.

Ophelia resurfaces (again)

Victorian iconography has an unusually long half-life in popular culture. John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), the floating figure from Hamlet, set the template for buoyant grief. Today, that image has re-entered popular consciousness through Taylor Swift’s album campaign for The Life of a Showgirl, photographed by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott: glittering costume, submerged body, the water’s surface fractured by highlights.

Reference — John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851–52), Tate Britain

Reference — Taylor Swift, The Life of a Showgirl (2025), cover art by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

I hope my work speaks to this lineage. It is not a simulation of painting but a choreography of light: surface tension as brush, refraction as line, breath as tempo. Where Millais’s Ophelia drifts toward extinction, the underwater body here refuses passivity — a demand for attention within a distracted culture.

Why this matters

For photographers
Craft as thesis: the future of the medium is not solely computational but material. Underwater practice offers a living laboratory for optics and embodied choreography.

For curators
Site specificity: installations within historically charged spaces transform how works are read. Pairing the work with architectural interpretation, ritual, or ecological programming deepens meaning.

For collectors
Acquisition logic: unique archival prints with comprehensive documentation and clear chains of custody behave closer to painting, ensuring conservation data accompanies each work.

For galleries
Positioning: situate the work within the long arc from daguerreotype to digital. World Photography Day provides an annual curatorial anchor.

Notes on World Photography Day
What it marks: the public release of the daguerreotype process on 19 August 1839 at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Why it matters: the state’s decision to publish the process accelerated global adoption — photography’s first open-source moment.

Captions & credits
Fig. 1 — Witness (2012). © Alexander James Hamilton / Distil Ennui Studio™.
Fig. 2 — Ophelia: Turned from Heaven’s Doors (2012). © Alexander James Hamilton / Distil Ennui Studio™.