Exploring Virginia’s Swimming Holes
For the past few summers, Bill Mauzy has laced up his hiking boots, and, with camera in hand, made his way to tucked-away swimming holes around Virginia. He’s found them through word of mouth and by researching them on websites such as swimmingholes.org. “I’ve had a lot of fun traveling to these places where I otherwise never would have considered traveling to,” says Mauzy, a landscape architect and photographer. “I’m amazed by how much there is to do in Virginia and how diverse the landscape is.”
His ongoing photography project goes beyond pretty pictures. Mauzy is fascinated by swimming holes as places of informal gathering, summertime ritual, and communion with nature. Through his lens, these often simple, humble landscapes become somehow transcendent.
“There seems to be a general concern with our society becoming increasingly disconnected or alienated from nature, particularly for children,” says Mauzy. “How could you get more immersed in nature than jumping in a swimming hole? It’s complete immersion in nature. In many cases, people revisit these places seasonally throughout their lives, establishing rituals. There’s immersion and ritual, which suggest to me that these are sacred places, spiritual landscapes.”
Mauzy’s design training has had a significant influence on his work as a photographer, helping him see places like swimming holes in nuanced ways and find layers of meaning in them. “These images have a subtext—there’s a rich history of people interacting with these landscapes,” he says. “I don’t know if I would ever have gotten to that realization without the sort of analytical training that a landscape architecture degree provided.”
Despite his thoughtful consideration of the cultural uses of these landscapes, most of his swimming hole pictures don’t include people. Mauzy explains that he regards these photographs as stage sets, a concept he learned from the work of Michael Kenna, a renowned landscape photographer. Kenna rarely includes people in his photos, but he leaves the viewer with a suggestion of the people who might inhabit the landscapes. “The resulting sense of emptiness leaves room for viewers to place themselves in the landscape,” says Mauzy. “That broadens the interpretive possibilities of the image.”
Mauzy photographs the swimming holes in soft, indirect light, capturing the dappled sunlight that trickles through the forest. His choice of black-and-white imagery is another key element of his approach. “I like to concentrate mostly on form, and by reducing or eliminating the color, it helps to communicate that aspect of a photograph more easily,” he says. “I do make color photographs commercially, but for my personal work, if it’s going to be in color, it has to be an image that is about the color.”
About the Photographer
Bill Mauzy is a landscape architect and photographer based in Nellysford, Virginia. His photographic art is available for purchase through Haley Fine Art of Sperryville, Virginia. He offers architectural and landscape garden photography on commission and practices site design and garden making through his firm, Three Ridges Landscape Architecture. For more, please visit mauzyphotography.com or
@mauzyphotography on Instagram.