Blackwater Galaxies

Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger has been working on his enormous collection of underwater photographs for many years. For this publication, he brings together the family of salps, tiny, transparent, yet highly differentiated creatures and forms that rise from the depths of the sea at night. Their fragile beauty is not merely a projection of the viewer but owes its overwhelming evidence to Wakolbinger’s magnificent images.
Christoph Ransmayr’s Seven Cantos, which accompany these photographs, give the salps a voice of their own. They are like testimonies from afar of a disconcerting shift in perspective the gaze now moves out of the underwater infinity and abruptly into the universe, without lingering on humans and their history.