





I am interested in the landscape as a recreational and social space. Swimming pools and the sea dominate much of my work, as I attempt to examine and reconnect with the environments that surrounded me growing up in a small coastal community.
This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools that have been drained or abandoned.
When full, the surface of a swimming pool is a flat continuation of the pool edge, obscuring what is below the surface. When drained, the depths are revealed -- allowing us to examine the empty pool postmortem.
These locations were once bustling social environments, and visiting them was a collective, public experience. Now deserted by swimmers, the experience of visiting these pools is solitary, still and private. Some have become bogs, homes or gardens -- new lives that often go unobserved. Photographing them can be a voyeuristic and dark experience. I have focused on an intimate view of these locations, using tight crops which also emphasize the absent, making these photos as much about what is not there as what is there.
Carlo Van de Roer was born in 1975 on a hill in Wellington, New Zealand. He studied photography at Victoria University then left New Zealand in 1999. Van de Roer got lost in Central America and various other corners of the world before finally landing in New York, where he now lives and works.
He has exhibited work with Mehr Gallery, Petra Projects, NY ADC and Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, Arena1 in California and MUSAC Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Leon. Van de Roer is a recipient of the ADC Young Guns Award, APA Silver to Pixels Award for Fine Art and the PDN PIX Award. He was a 2007 Hot Shot and named among the Photolucida Top 50 Photographers.