Crowded at sea

A word about the work

The image was taken in St. Malo, Bretagne during the summer of 2007. Joost was inspired to create something with diving boards and swimming pools because at that time, his two daughters were taking swimming lessons and therefore he spent a lot of time at swimming pools.
The photo was chosen by a professional jury as the winning image for the 90th anniversary of the Photo society in Leiden.

I live close to the ocean in the Netherlands and frequently go to the coast. The atmosphere at the seaside is very special to me. The sea gives me a feeling of infinity, peace and freedom, but the ocean can also be dangerous and grim. This makes the ocean an interesting subject.
When I was in Bretagne and saw this natural swimming pool in the Atlantic Ocean with its beautiful, old diving board, all the pieces came together. I waited until late afternoon, when there was perfect light at high tide. My first idea had been to take a picture of the infinite ocean with one lonely swimmer diving off the deserted diving board. However, it was a beautiful summer day and therefore it was very crowded with people repeatedly jumping off and climbing up again. Each successive dive was even more interesting than one preceding it. It seemed like the divers were inspiring each other to jump as spectacularly as possible. I immediately decided to reverse my idea and instead of one lonely diver, I tried to capture as many diving people as possible. Because I stood on the edge of the swimming pool and the water from the rising tide came up very quickly, I had only a limited amount of time to shoot the pictures.
By combining various pictures I created an image of swimmers dangerously jumping one after the other into the infinite ocean.

Jean-Denis’s choice

Photojournalism is the DNA of the gallery and it is rare for a photomontage to appeal to me, or at least to the point of wanting to exhibit it and offer it for sale. But in this case I really fell in love with it. Joost popped into the gallery by chance, we had a look at his site… and there you have it.