Local Jacksonville artist, Christina Hope, has been working as a photographer for over 20 years. Hope is very passionate about her work and decided to embark on a new form of photography in 2001. She has been shooting underwater for many years, in both black and white, as well as other forms of film. Her recent exhibition, Water Angels, is located in the Haskell Gallery, which is inside the Jacksonville International Airport. Hope’s show consists of many images of semi-nude women underwater, either wrapped in garments or unconventional materials, in strange but intriguing poses, exactly the same as an angel. Hope’s images look almost drawn and have a beautiful grain to them. Also, the choice of black and white helps with the flow of the exhibition and definitely adds to the overall tone that follows throughout her work. All of the photographs have a beautiful texture that keep your eyes moving throughout each piece and is clearly developed by Hope’s use of light. Hope states, “I go underwater with my camera, with ideas, with visions. The compositions are classical, sometimes allegorical. All involve the human form.”

When I first saw this exhibition my initial reaction was, “Wow, what beautiful photographs. They look just like…”, and that is all I really need to tell you. They are very well done and aesthetically pleasing, but Hope is definitely not the first person to take whimsical, underwater, black and white photos. This technique has been very popular recently in fashion photography and pregnancy photography. Also the idea of recreating angles out of twenty-first century humans has already been done by a totally different photographer and has also appeared in classic Disney television shows. The exhibition as a whole was not that bad, but it looked very incomplete due to one half of the venue was empty and dark. I think that if Hope had expanded her ideas and had created a few more photos or pushed the boundaries of just angels underwater then she would have done much better than what was shown.

Image courtesy of Abi Dannheim ’19.