Beautiful meditative photographs of the human body in dreamlike natural settings. Nudes emerge from irridescent pools of water creating a transcendental eroticism. The line between landscape and figure is surrealistically blurred so that one imitates the other. A partially submerged leg or torso resembles a riverbank; a rock looks like a human form; water becomes desert sand and a body the dunes.

"There is something primal and satisfying about the nude and water. In combination, they establish an irresistible rapport between the viewer and the art - an effect that is presented clearly in Karin Rosenthal's work. She uses the attractive elements of water, abstraction, and the nude body to provide sensual pleasure while de-emphasizing the sexual. Sexual pleasure, dependent on immediate and physical gratification, can be fleeting and mundane, while sensual pleasure lives its own life of constant anticipation and renewal."

The artist on her work:

"My desire to photograph nudes was born of the water, of a passion for being in and meditating upon still waters. Wanting to make statements about human nature as I had before in portraits and street pictures, I sought a way to photograph people in water to create images of a psychological, dreamlike, and emotive nature. When I began the Nudes in Water series in 1975, I felt that water, the source of all life, should display an equivalent density to flesh, invoking a cauldron of creation and a visceral visual connection between body and nature. These motivations were to become the foundation for all photographs that followed."

KARIN ROSENTHAL, a Wellesley College graduate, studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her nudes have been published in such books as Eros, Male Nudes by Women, and in the magazines View Camera, Print, The Journal of Erotica (London), and Nikon News (Switzerland). Rosenthal's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and is in numerous collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, Harvard University's Fogg Museum, the International Center of Photography, Polaroid's National and International Collections, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship from Wellesley College and a grant from the LEF Foundation.

Public Collections

• Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
• Boston Public Library, Boston, MA
• Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
• Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
• Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
• International Center of Photography, New York, NY
• International Polaroid Collection/Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Polaroid Collections, National and International, Cambridge, MA
• Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
• Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA