page_title: Michael Dweck
section_title: Mermaids
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Dweck / Visual artist / Mermaids
caption_attribution_description: This mural by Michael Dweck was installed near Nicole Henry's Fine Art gallery during the 2015 Canvas art fair in West Palm Beach.
context_page_description: Michael Dweck is an American visual artist and filmmaker. Best known for his narrative photography, Dweck's work "explores ongoing struggles between identity and adaptation in endangered societal enclaves." In 2003, he became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at Sotheby's, and in 2012, he was the first American photographer to exhibit his work in Cuba since the beginning of the United States embargo in 1960.
  He lives and works in New York City and in Montauk, New York.
  Born in 1957 in Brooklyn, Dweck grew up in Bellmore, Long Island, attending John F. Kennedy High School and then Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to study architecture, communication and fine arts. Upon graduation, Dweck founded Michael Dweck & Co., later known as Dweck & Campbell, winning a number of advertising industry awards before closing the firm in 2001 to pursue his artistic interests. Over the next decade, Dweck built a substantial reputation in fine art photography with works including The End: Montauk, N.Y.
context_section_description: Dweck's second book Mermaids was released in 2008 by Ditch Plains Press. Its photographs featured female nudes swimming under water, evoking the legend of the mermaid. As art editor Christopher Sweet described them in his introduction to the book, “Whether diving in the blue refractions of a swimming pool or suspended like a seraph in the cool, pellucid depths of a spring or emerging tentatively onto a rocky shore, Michael Dweck's mermaids are lovely and aloof and bare of all raiment but for their beautiful manes and the elemental draperies that surround them. Water, light, and lens converge to capture in modern guise the elusive creature of myth.”
  Like his previous book, The End: Montauk, N.Y., Mermaids was inspired by Dweck's experiences interacting with the local environment. While night fishing in the waters off Long Island's south shore, Dweck was captivated by the flashing streaks of light caused by fish swimming beneath him. "The idea was, if I happen to fall overboard one night, what would I see down there? Those flashes of light could be mermaids."Mermaids continued the focus on attractive young people in water settings which characterized The End, but departed from The End's romantic realism to veer into fantasy, with photographs blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
  Unlike The End, Mermaids was shot in and through the water, using methods for underwater flash photography developed by Harold Eugene Edgerton. The technology required to house and protect large format cameras was not yet widely available, leading Dweck to design his own cases for the project, using weights and pulleys to manipulate the camera. To obtain the desired angles for the shots, Dweck used two different techniques, diving into the water with his subjects, either with a long snorkel or unaided, and shooting from behind a glass wall placed within the river. As Dweck explained it:
  I just started to experiment. I said to myself, "OK, I have light, I have a lens and I have water"
  Rather than use professional models, Dweck turned to women with the experience needed to move comfortably and naturally in underwater environments, including friends from his native Long Island's East End as well as residents of the rural fishing village Aripeka, Florida. Shooting took place both locally in Montauk and Amagansett and in the Weeki Wachee River, where some inhabitants of Aripeka, located on a nearby island in the Gulf of Mexico, had been employed to perform at the Weeki Wachee Springs waterpark while costumed as mermaids. According to Christopher Sweet, Dweck met a performer who had been raised in Aripeka and had spent her life in and around water, who then introduced him to other local girls, “some of whom could hold their breath underwater for as long as five or six minutes.”
  Photographs from Mermaids were exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, Belgium and Hamburg. Playboy France featured selections in its October 2008 edition under the title "Le Bal des Sirènes." One gelatin silver print from the collection entitled "Mermaid 1" sold at auction in 2009 at Christie's in London for over $17,000, well over initial estimates. In May 2015, Dweck's "Mermaid 18" sold for £27,500 at Phillips London, 
  over double the initial estimate.
  For West Palm Beach's Canvas art fair in November 2015, Dweck mounted several murals near the Nicole Henry Fine Art gallery. These murals featured oversized prints of Dweck's mermaids swimming away from the viewer into a black background.
  On November 17, 2015, Elin Nordegren held a dinner in Dweck's honor at her beachfront home in North Palm Beach, Florida, with guests including Chris Cline and Laura Norman, both of whom, like Nordegren, are avid collectors of Dweck's work. Dishes prepared by her personal chef were based upon themes drawn from both Mermaids and Dweck's earlier work, The End: Montauk, NY.
caption: One of Dweck's mermaids on an outdoor mural at the 2015 Canvas art fair in West Palm Beach
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