AQUA
MARIA ELISA FERRARIS in conversation with MATILDE MANICARDI
MARIA ELISA FERRARIS in conversation with MATILDE MANICARDI
MM: The ocean and its waters carry a rich and ancient allegorical tradition. How did this prolonged observation resonate with you personally?
MEF: The ocean became a mirror of my inner reality—its presence a cradle, a force urging me to explore, reveal, and bring order to what was bubbling up in my unconscious. This process unfolded gradually, beginning as a subtle fascination. I found myself photographing the sea and its movements almost by chance while working in Taranto, a city in Southern Italy. As I began to sequence this initial set of images, I realised I was drawn to the sea’s power to evoke in me a profound, timeless, and irrational feeling that stirred something beyond conscious thought. It was as if everything was imprinted in that movement, in the ebb and flow, predictable only in part, with a relentless and mechanical persistence. Observing it created space for my inner reality, allowing me to clarify my vision. As my awareness of this process deepened, I recognised that the images I had captured so far were not enough to fully express it; I needed to continue experimenting and dive deeper into this intuition. This realisation led me to seek a place even more aligned with the journey unfolding within me, bringing me to Nazaré in Portugal, to Praia do Norte, during the season of giant waves. As soon as I saw those massive, unrestrained bodies of water, I felt, paradoxically, a sense of peace, because I realised I had found exactly what I was searching for. The project took shape in Nazaré, but its initial imprint came from the sea in Taranto. What led you there? How has your relationship with water evolved from place to place? My connection with Taranto began a few years ago through a close friend who lived there. At a certain point, I felt a strong urge to photograph the city, initially focusing on the socio-environmental issues in certain areas. Over time, however, I moved beyond a purely documentary approach, shifting to a more evocative, personal narrative of the city. One day, while trying to reach a location, I got lost and stumbled upon a secluded cove at sunset, alone. Almost instinctively, I began photographing the sea, captivated by its endless movement. Initially, I set those pictures aside, but gradually, I realised they were answering a different question. So, I decided to revisit and work on them.
The sea had become a kind of welcoming ritual, grounding me year after year in something deeply familiar. It was this sea that laid the aesthetic and thematic foundation for the work, initiating a silent dialogue. Later, the ocean at Nazaré confirmed that I was indeed exploring the right path. It represented a force to be reinterpreted, allowing me to experiment more fully from a visual perspective as well.
The sea had become a kind of welcoming ritual, grounding me year after year in something deeply familiar. It was this sea that laid the aesthetic and thematic foundation for the work, initiating a silent dialogue. Later, the ocean at Nazaré confirmed that I was indeed exploring the right path. It represented a force to be reinterpreted, allowing me to experiment more fully from a visual perspective as well.
MM: As you mentioned, reworking the power of the ocean in Nazaré during each observation has allowed you to deepen your visual research from time to time. Would you tell me more about this aspect?
MEF: In the first group of images I created in Italy, I already felt an emotional intensity, but I decided to set them aside in favour of a new series of photographs that, while consistent in subject and production method, allowed for more variety. In this series, I sometimes sought a flattening effect, reducing forms almost to graphic symbols of extreme simplicity; at other times, I pursued a sense of volume, a richness of nuances and details, a continuous interplay between solidity and softness in the surfaces. I aimed to capture varied forms that could convey the unpredictable nature of water and, in a broader sense, of everything around us. I wanted each image to carry its singular value—each capable of revealing and containing a world, a sensation—and yet to work in sequence, almost like a musical composition, where evocative and rhythmic qualities play a central role. The choice to use black and white stems, I believe, from my training and partly answers a need for both expressive and formal synthesis, as it highlights the underlying structures.
MM: The water’s surface is exposed as the protagonist, while the depths beneath it hold endless possibilities, inviting a restless imagination since the beginning of time. Have you ever feared the ocean?
MEF: If you watch a few seconds longer, the waves become creatures of countless forms, swirling in vast, uncontrollable masses, dangerous if you’re unfamiliar with them. On one hand, their obsessive rhythm and beauty feel calming and majestic; on the other, the sheer volumes and endless shapes within them evoke a sense of anxiety, something frightening, crushing, and hurling—an elusive fear. To my eyes, the water held all the infinite shades of gray, but when certain waves formed, it turned black; it was like facing an abyss.
MM: The opening verse, “Facing the world, I sensed the pain,” introduces the book, reflecting on a time when, as you shared, you turned to the sea during an emotionally complex period. I’d love to know more about how your approach to water has shaped your relationship with yourself during this time of personal growth.
MEF: This verse refers to the start of my adult life, when I first encountered the world independently, exploring it and questioning who I was and what was my purpose; the big questions everyone eventually asks themselves. Since then, introspection has become a constant part of my life. It took years, though, before I recognised this reflection in the sea, realising that it could help me shape a vision of myself and the world. The true encounter with this idea happened during the most intense period of my growth and self-exploration, which ultimately led to creating these images. For me, photography is deeply connected to an inner search; it shapes my experiences, serves as a conduit for life itself, and redefines the relationships between my inner and outer worlds.
MM: As you mentioned once, “The history of the individual is interwoven with a wider history.” I’d be interested to hear more about how returning to live as a “form,” as you put it, has shaped your relationship with the world.
MEF: These photographs emerged as reflections of an introspective dialogue, a journey of exploration and connection with my unconscious, but also an aesthetic one, where water and its wave motion serve as symbols. This dialogue began in the early years of my adult life and has since evolved into an ongoing search for the origins of this emotional state. A pivotal realisation for me was understanding that the overwhelming sense of absoluteness, the inability to distil the vast experiences and impressions I absorbed from the outside world—with its elusive, fluid nature, like water, ever-changing—might stem from an ancient, profound, and yet unresolved encounter between my individual and collective histories. From this encounter we are left with “images,” archetypal forms that underpin every experience and which I refer to as “forms,” something to be listened to and drawn forth. This process stems from a desire to progressively reduce what is in excess, digging deeper and deeper into one’s inner life. This intuition led me to reframe my relationship with the external world, allowing me to see it as a “form” in terms of vision, a fleeting image, a fragmented yet eternal exteriority centred in constant transformation, like a wave. We grasp only a condensed, saturated image of it, without fully comprehending its meaning, history, or absolute value.
MM: “Defleshing and reducing” describes the incessant movement of the waves, a rhythm defined by rigour, effort, and constancy. In a world of maximalism, it’s fascinating to consider this essentiality, which I see both in your artistic practice and in the principles and working methods of CESURA, the photographic collective you are part of.
MEF: In those lines, I was initially referring to my internal process of reflection on the external world; an effort to gain emotional understanding through reduction and decomposition into accessible elements: concepts, figures, and feelings that are easier to process. Our personal histories, when set against the vastness of universal history that sweeps over us, can provoke a sense of confusion and loss of identity. For this reason, inner exploration requires both effort and constancy. In the second place, I was speaking about my photographic practice. Finding one’s language and purpose is one of the most challenging aspects of photography, demanding constant, prolonged practice. The term “defleshing” reflects the rigour these two pursuits require—deconstructing and reassembling to reach the essence of personal experience, and, in photographic terms, progressively reshaping and clarifying one’s direction. My training and the work methods of my collective, CESURA, have greatly influenced this commitment to rigour and dedication. Aesthetically, my photographs aren’t always minimalist in the traditional sense, given their richness of detail and form, but my aim is to create images that feel complete and necessary. “Defleshing and reducing” also describes the process by which these photographs were made: through repetitive, nearly exhaustive study of a single subject. Unable to address multiple subjects, I chose to focus on one, capturing as many facets as possible and excluding the rest.
Matilde Manicardi is a writer and editor living between London and Milan. Her work focuses on cultural politics, photography, and visual art at large.
In Maria Elisa Ferraris’ Aqua we witness the wild, terrible, awesome, raw, relentless power of water. In 34 spectacular photographs it rises, falls, lifts, pushes, pounds, churns, heaves, hammers, roils, boils, breaks, surges, slams, crashes, smashes, thunders, roars, and rages. It comes at you and doesn’t stop.
The images in Aqua were made in Nazaré, the coastal town and surfing mecca in Portugal known for having the largest waves ever surfed. The book is not about surfing however. You do not see any humans, and in only a few places do you even see the shore.
The photographs are black and white, apparently made with a longer focal-length lens that slightly flattens the images. They offer a varied inventory of wave forms, many of them breaking, some details and some wider views. The light is saturated with deep shadows. Rich, bold blacks and shining highlights are favored and mild, nuanced midtones are mostly absent. If it were music, Aqua would be played fortissimo rather than piano.
Aqua makes a good case for why the photobook is its own thing, distinct from, but built of, individual photographs, in the same way that a story or essay is more than the sum of its sentences. The photos are landscape format, except the concluding one, and they are sequenced one to a page. After we absorb their visual sound and fury, two blank pages separate the body from a final image of a slight swell, smooth and calm, but suggesting the menacing threat lurking beneath the surface.
At about eight inches long by eight and a half high, the book is not coffee-table sized. A commercial publisher would likely scale it larger, aiming to up its impact, but it would lose its intimacy along with a measure of its understated poetry. Like with other successful photobooks, the images in Aqua do the work of showing the viewer what they are about. No explanation is required to connect with their cumulative force.
A short poem by the author that evokes the ocean precedes the photographs, and a printed insert in the form of a conversation with writer / editor Matilde Manicardi provides background as to Ferraris’ intentions. They suggest that the ocean can stand for many things, from our inner emotional state to our relationship with nature to the constantly changing shapes and forms of the visible world. Ferraris discusses the origins and development of her project and mentions that, watching them, “the waves become creatures of countless forms, swirling in vast, uncontrollable masses… their sheer volumes and endless shapes within them evoke a sense of anxiety, something frightening, crushing, and hurling – an elusive fear.”
The images in Aqua were made in Nazaré, the coastal town and surfing mecca in Portugal known for having the largest waves ever surfed. The book is not about surfing however. You do not see any humans, and in only a few places do you even see the shore.
The photographs are black and white, apparently made with a longer focal-length lens that slightly flattens the images. They offer a varied inventory of wave forms, many of them breaking, some details and some wider views. The light is saturated with deep shadows. Rich, bold blacks and shining highlights are favored and mild, nuanced midtones are mostly absent. If it were music, Aqua would be played fortissimo rather than piano.
Aqua makes a good case for why the photobook is its own thing, distinct from, but built of, individual photographs, in the same way that a story or essay is more than the sum of its sentences. The photos are landscape format, except the concluding one, and they are sequenced one to a page. After we absorb their visual sound and fury, two blank pages separate the body from a final image of a slight swell, smooth and calm, but suggesting the menacing threat lurking beneath the surface.
At about eight inches long by eight and a half high, the book is not coffee-table sized. A commercial publisher would likely scale it larger, aiming to up its impact, but it would lose its intimacy along with a measure of its understated poetry. Like with other successful photobooks, the images in Aqua do the work of showing the viewer what they are about. No explanation is required to connect with their cumulative force.
A short poem by the author that evokes the ocean precedes the photographs, and a printed insert in the form of a conversation with writer / editor Matilde Manicardi provides background as to Ferraris’ intentions. They suggest that the ocean can stand for many things, from our inner emotional state to our relationship with nature to the constantly changing shapes and forms of the visible world. Ferraris discusses the origins and development of her project and mentions that, watching them, “the waves become creatures of countless forms, swirling in vast, uncontrollable masses… their sheer volumes and endless shapes within them evoke a sense of anxiety, something frightening, crushing, and hurling – an elusive fear.”
Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.