NEW55 FILM
BOB CROWLEY
TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2011

Sometimes by pure chance one comes across an unexpected or astonishing find: Such was the case at Galerie103 in Poipu, Kauai, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Gallery owner Bruna Stude's own photographs are modestly displayed in the small corridor between her two larger Galerie103 spaces that contain current shows.

Empty Oceans (link here-very much worth clicking on!) are Stude's more recent expressions of her ocean-going life since she left her native home of Croatia. A scuba and free diver, Bruna Stude would crew on ships every year, sail to relatively unknown and nontraditional places. "I just drop in the middle of the blue ocean, experiencing the feeling of being in a place people haven't been." For over a decade, Stude would dive on remote places and they would always see lots of ocean life, but then in the last several years, fewer large fish, like sharks, were seen. "Last year we didn't see any" she explained, "it became disturbing, the world changing at a fast pace that we are not aware of."

It was around that time that Stude made what she thinks was an unconscious decision to photograph the empty ocean. Over one week, in Seven Seas a day of empty ocean was chronicled. "But it is beautiful" she said. "I've found a way to photograph how it feels to be in it, and after experiments with cameras and shutter speeds I've learned how to do it. I try to say how it feels."

Visit more of Bruna Stude's work here.

Seascape 20