Afterimage by Lou Stoppard:

This image was taken in the summer of 2022 during the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest. The U.S. swimmer Anita Alvarez fainted or lost consciousness while performing. The photograph was taken by Oli Scarff, a press photographer present at the event. What I find so beautiful about the image is, first, its dream-like quality. The softness of her limbs in the water conveys fragility. The two bodies entwined looks almost like a scene from a Renaissance painting. But there's also something else—a real sense of tenderness and transcendence.

I’ve always been drawn to images taken in or under water, and to stories related to water. When I was growing up, my favorite book was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. The idea of submersion and drowning has always fascinated me. Drowning is such a strange word because it’s often used in a very pragmatic, negative sense, referring to literal drowning or death. But we also use it metaphorically, to convey a depth of feeling—like ‘drowning in ideas,’ ‘drowning in emotions,’ or even ‘drowning in money.’ There’s a complexity to this idea that I think is reflected in the image. It almost looks choreographed, and it reminds me of some of my favorite photographic series, such as Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, which I study frequently—those underwater shots taken in public pools.

I think my fascination with the image is to with the combination of delicateness, elegance, and drama. It’s full of contradictions in that it depicts a very fraught event, but reads as a very still, slow moment. There’s a lingering sensation about it that I find incredibly beautiful.

As a child, I loved swimming. I was a competitive swimmer and spent a lot of time underwater. There’s a sense of suspended feeling when you’re submerged, like a suspension of sound. I’ve never been able to meditate—I'm too much of an overthinker —but for me, swimming, that hum you get in your ears when you’re submerged, offers a kind of meditation. It’s the feeling that you can disappear. I would spend hours in the pool as a child, diving as low as I could, letting my body float. I think the sensation of floating and being held by water—it’s such an unusual sensation, isn’t it? Obviously, she’s literally unconscious in this moment, but I remember play-acting at something similar as a child—diving under the water and letting myself be still, without intention, allowing my limbs to flail, almost playing-dead. There’s a way of letting go and floating in the water that’s deeply freeing. So I think I also really feel the sensation of the image, which is a strange power it has. I can almost feel the bodily aspect of it. Since I first saw it while reading the news, it has become an image I think about constantly and return to often—not just for its beauty, but for the feelings it evokes.

What’s also fascinating is that, when you think of the language of competitive sports photography—the context in which this image originated—you don’t typically think of poetic imagery. Sports photography is often very visually arresting, striking imagery. But I think maybe the poetry and stillness in this image was actually quite striking for many. There’s something about it that feels almost like a scene from a Disney movie or a love film as it evokes the idea of being saved, which is one of the most romantic concepts there is.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream—much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.