_'no lifeguard on duty'

_How incredible is this set of photographs by US photographer J Bennetts Fitts. It a subject that has been covered before, but Fitts tjaes it that bit further. Each photograph conforms to a basic template: The empty swimming pools of crappy old roadside lodges are photographed during the evening's twilight hour, when shadows disappear and color tones run long and vibrant. Each pool and landscape has its own characteristics—some hold small ponds of cola-colored rainwater; one has been filled entirely with dirt and a fresh coat of turf. But rather than becoming attached to any one individually, we begin to contemplate the proliferation of these small, failed oases. Once signifiers of a uniquely post-War strain of manifest destiny, the pools now lay stagnant and untended.

Fitts is a romantic at heart, though, and his photographs are as much about dusks and cloudscapes and palm trees and desert atmospheres as they are about swimming pools. Like Caspar David Friedrich paintings, the foregrounded subject matter exists primarily to facilitate a sublime vision of the land (as well as to remind us of our humble position in the enduring scope of nature). Fitts' best images are as gorgeous as any Richard Misrach landscape, and demand to be seen in person, where their delicate tonalities and stories might suggest far more than their subjects might ever let on.

See more at: www.jbennettfitts.com