Waves by CJ Kale and Nick Selway 

As a former surfer, Paul Bobko had plenty of time to observe waves of all shapes and forms. It was during this time that he found his inspiration for his series Water Landscapes-Suspended Energy. 

About the project:

In his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon introduces us to the German concept of Brenschluss in the telemetry of the flight of the V2 rocket. The rocket is propelled by its engines and travels along its parabolic arc. At a certain point the engines turn off, this flameout is called brenschluss. At brenschluss the rocket’s ascendancy is checked by gravity, and before it begins to fall to its target on earth, it hesitates for just a moment. After this moment gravity and momentum alone, not a rocket engine, define the inexorable trajectory of descent to its inevitable, calamitous end.

So to do Paul Bobko’s Water Landscapes-Suspended Energy photographs allow us to see that very moment of hesitation when the force of nature that is the ocean wave, ceases to be propelled by the surging forces of the ocean floor. The ocean suddenly lets go and sets it free, it hesitates at this moment of release, then crashes on the shore, liberated, but spent. Bobko shows us this very moment of hesitation, before the explosion. The outline of the explosion is clear and coming, but it hasn’t happened yet, it is, as yet, prelude…the power is still coiled in the curl, frozen for this second. Light comes glowing through that watery tunnel, foam is leaping from its crest, escaping and ecstatic. The menace is limned in the terrifying flexing of its form. It is most exhilarating to see the noun become the verb.

Photographer Tim McKenna has been documenting the unusual natural conditions that make the waves of Teahuppo a Tahitian sacred sanctuary for surf. 

About the project:

Fascinated by the aestheticism as well as by the untamed mutant wave. Tim McKenna photographed the beast from all angles until he captured the nature of its almost unreal beauty. Shot from the air or the sea, his photographs look like liquid sculpture and oceanic transparencies…that makes us enter into the heart of the barrels, cathedrals of light and salty water or fly above the transhumance of these ephemeral miracles of nature that are the waves in the South Pacific.