AQUARIUM
Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

Hardbound, 9.25" x 11.625", 120 pages
37 four-color and 37 duotone illustrations
2003 , Aperture
Essay by Todd Newberry

Cook and Jenshel, wife and husband, work together on large projects, she in black and white, he in color. Turning to water after a project about volcanoes, they settled on two approaches, one concerned with ice, the other with immense aquariums--hence, one with pure nature, the other with nature humanly constrained. Their aquarium pictures are gorgeous, thoughtful, and provocative. At first the black-and-whites seem more artificial and abstract, especially in the subtly turbulent image of a tiger plunging after a pumpkin, which is virtually impossible to decipher without a written explanation. But it is almost as hard to "decode" the adjacent color image of a spotlighted shark lunging toward the viewer. Other color pictures are forthrightly painterly: illuminist (a redheaded woman watches identically red jellyfish), magical realist (a baby and a turtle in a seeming face-off), and, of course, surrealist (the giant fish-nose "invading" a sunken classical Greek city). Biologist Todd Newberry's essay and the interview-afterword raise piquant questions about the aquarium experience for inhabitants as well as spectators.
Ray Olson - Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Photographers:
Len Jenshel and Diane Cook are among America’s foremost landscape photographers. Fascinated by the spectacles offered to aquarium visitors, they have traveled around the world photographing these dramatic environments and their enthralled audiences. Fifteen aquariums in North America, five in Europe, five in the Caribbean (including three in Cuba), and three in Japan are included in this volume.

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