"Silent Waves" IV 2007 / 2007

Born in Miami Beach in 1951, Douglas Busch now lives in Malibu, California. He calls his series of seascapes “Silent Waves”. In Silent Waves, Busch uses digital photography to capture quiet, sublime and dramatic moments of the eternal encounter between light and water. His images seem self-evident and natural, as if they had created themselves, with their meditative atmosphere. It is rare that we meet such pictures of nature, which are made with the most modern technical means, but that express at the same time such a “paintingly”, emotional quality. Busch’s photographs remind us of abstract paintings and they incorporate such intense “allure” because they translate “water” and “light” into sensual compositions of fragile colors.
“In the first part of 2003, Douglas Busch rented for a time a beach bungalow in Malibu with a sundeck extending over the surface of the sea. From then on, his sea images begin to move away from the type of photography in which the subject is easily recognisable, instead becoming increasingly abstract in nature until they end up as meditations on light and colour. He begins photographing the sea literally at every moment of the day and night, from the first light of dawn until the fading of the last traces of natural light in the evening, finally using searchlights to illuminate the water at night. (…)With their starkly reduced range of colours, the resulting pictures have little in common with photography in the generally accepted sense of the word. These monochrome studies lack anything like an identifiable content. We are now dealing with the play of light and colour in a visual space. Within these structures, it is still occasionally possible to make out  individual waves or clouds. These almost serve further to heighten the impact of these images, as they comprise the only point of reference within them.
The ‘Waves’ are just as romantic as they are lucid.”Quotes: Thomas Schirmböck