Christy Lee Rogers: Baroque Water Worlds

Online Exhibition

Christy Lee Rogers (American, b. 1972) is a visual artist from Kailua, Hawaii. She creates beautiful, complex, and colorful photographs and videos of individuals and groups underwater. The fluid compositions, choreography, costumes, dramatic lighting, and bold colors Rogers employs in her large-scale digital images are reminiscent of 17th century Baroque paintings by European masters such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1610). Her obsession with water as a medium breaks the conventions of contemporary photography. Rogers applies her cunning technique to a barrage of bodies submerged in water during the night, and creates her effects using the refraction of light. Through a fragile process of experimentation, she builds elaborate scenes of coalesced colors and entangled bodies that exalt the human character as one of vigor and warmth, while also capturing the beauty and vulnerability of the tragic experience that is the human condition.

Rogers’ works have been exhibited globally, featured in international magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar Art China, Elle Decoration, Global Times, The Independent, Casa Vogue, Photo Technique, Photo Korea, and more, and recently has been commissioned by Apple to create underwater images with the iPhone 11Pro, as well as being featured in one of their behind-the-scenes process films. Rogers' art has been featured on several music album covers, including Orchesography, for the band Wang Chung, and her images were selected for the 2013–2014 performance season of the Angers-Nantes Opera in France. She has won dozens of international awards and honors, most recently recently the Open Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2019. Rogers currently lives and works in Nashville, TN, where she also works as a mother, filmmaker, and musician.

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Click thumbnails below for full images and text by Christy Lee Rogers.