Photography is sometimes about taking a concept, and trying to model it in one picture. Difficult endeavor if the concept is intangible. Consider the example of picturing a thought. An idea.

The underwater world is dark. Sun rays can barely make it to 600 feet deep. Below 3,000 feet, it is always midnight. Photographing subjects in a dark underwater set-up take us back to the way we imagine the abyss.

Then there is the notion of the singularity of a thought. Does a thought ever comes alive a singleton ? The truth is, a thought is one in millions, just with a brighter or louder tone, and our mind focuses on it. For a nanosecond, or for minutes at a time.

Representing a thought like a single light bulb is very misleading. True, the incandescent light bulb has become the universal icon for an idea, even as these light bulbs are becoming obsolete.

I decided to represent a thought with a lit air bubble. The larger the bubble, the bigger the idea. Millions of bubbles flowing up, clearly originating in our brain, coalescing in the air, creating a theme, a line, an explosion.

Lola took a book underwater to do the "Enlightenment" photographic series. A hard cover classic literature book, nonetheless! Paper and water don't work well together: the book lasted only a couple of short minutes. I included here two enlightenment photograph:

Few moments later, the book gave way. We changed the lighting and took few more shots as Lola was "finishing" the book, pun intended.

Epilogue: it took me few hours to clean the pool from all the paper that was lodged in every corner, and clogged every filter and every pipe. I will think twice before shooting another underwater-book-reading series until we create a book mock-up that can last underwater