In Pamela Crimmins’s surreal, painterly photographs, people and their environments interact in psychologically suggestive ways. Using an underwater camera, Crimmins shoots up through the surface of water, effectively turning the water into a moving, multi-lobed lens that distorts the appearance of her subjects. Her work explores and exploits the properties of water, including its ability to refract, condense, and magnify light and to separate the color spectrum into its component parts. Working in pools, ponds, and the ocean, Crimmins considers the effects that wind, swells, salt, organic matter, and time of day will have on the water. She uses her body as an additional tool to affect her images by agitating the surface of the water with her flippers and hands. Her most recent work is also manipulated in Photoshop.

The images presented in “Dream House”, her most recent series, include references to architecture for the first time, and place their subjects in a larger space that includes both the built and the natural environment. They offer a glimpse of a world that is shifting, unpredictable and chaotic, but also kaleidoscopically beautiful. In these images, people, their homes and the natural world flow into one another in a pre-lapsarian dream state where the physical and psychological are merged, suggesting a place where the force of the mind affects matter as much as matter affects the mind. Previous bodies of work have addressed the loneliness and strangeness of childhood, the distorted nature of femininity, manly interaction with the elements and the dwarfing power of the sea. Pamela Crimmins’ work has been included in numerous gallery and museum shows, and is in the collections of Deutschebank and Jane Holzer. She received a Pollock-Krasner award in 1997.