MARC : Does that progression into abstraction parallel your own personal story as an artist and person ?
KARINE : Yes ! It ' s represents my own experience and my encounters with people at that time .
MARC : Is that how these photos from Fire Island in the end of the book came about ?
KARINE : I reconnected with a guy I had known years before . He re-entered my life in 2010 and was dating someone , and they had started a band called The Swimming Pools .
MARC : That ’ s funny .
KARINE : I joked that he was inspired by my first body of work about the pools . I liked their music , so I suggested to do a project together . They were working on a new album and asked me to take the pictures for the album cover , and I said maybe I can use some of the pictures for my own project . I had been going to Fire Island for twenty years . So I told them why don ' t we go there , and I know a few people with pools , and we can do something around the pool . That was the first time I actually directed a shot .
MARC : What do you mean ?
KARINE : When I started this in Barcelona , I was taking pictures as an observer in a spontaneous way . But with the last part of the book , I became the choreographer — the director . The guys had those shiny costumes , and I asked them to wear them underwater and do a dance — a choreography underwater .
MARC : From observer to director — does that mean you had also become more secure in yourself as an artist ?
KARINE : I never thought about it that way but yes , probably . But I also hate to repeat myself . I can get bored easily . I need to constantly not get bored , so I guess I was trying different ways to photograph .
MARC : Which is a sign of your entire body of work — you always try something new . You like to experiment .
KARINE : Yes .
MARC : Some of these later images are so precisely framed and focused . How do you achieve that with something so imprecise as water ?
KARINE : I don ' t always control it . Although I can never see the image as it happens since I don ' t shoot digitally , somehow , I know when I have what I ' m after . I ' m very observant . I ' ve photographed water now for a while . I can anticipate it . Sometimes you ' re trying to capture something and you think you got it , and something else happens that ’ s even more interesting .
MARC : So what ' s your fascination with water ?
KARINE : I feel so free when I ' m in water . For me , it ' s so reinvigorating . I can feel so alive in water . I grew up not scared of water . I grew up sailing with my family . My uncle had a sailboat — still has one — so since we were little , we ' d go sail in the summer and swim in the open sea .
MARC : But again , the open sea also can be scary .
KARINE : At the same time , it can be scary . I used to surf and once , I almost drowned when I went surfing during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 . I was out there for twenty minutes trying to come back . It felt like hours . I was so exhausted my whole body felt broken for the next two weeks .
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