Goddesses, Sirens, and Mermaids is an underwater art photography project. The concept was born of Todd Essick’s love for the sea and its inhabitants and his desire to share, aesthetically, something of the bond we all share with the ocean.
Goddesses, Sirens, and Mermaids began in 1999 and Beginnings chronicles the first four locations photographed as part of this ongoing project. These images represent a work in progress and powerfully demonstrate Todd Essick’s desire to unite the grace and beauty of the sea with that of the female form. His photographs are an attempt to bridge the distance to that divine mystery all great art aspires to explore.
Todd Essick employs nothing but film, models, the expansive underwater seascapes and the animals who dwell there to create his images. Neither digital overlaying, montage, nor Photoshop sleight of hand has been used in the production of these photographs.
THEY ARE REAL PHOTOGRAPHS.
Todd Gary Essick was raised in the Chicago area, spent summers in Ocean City, New Jersey and family vacations in South Florida. He first became enchanted with the sea as a child. He was a member in good standing of the official Diver Dan fan club, slept for years with a stuffed Flipper, and is still convinced that Jacques Cousteau is a distant cousin, twice removed.
After moving to Florida, he attended a commercial art school. During his final semester, an interest in photography was sparked by the realization that he was an awful painter and an even worse sculptor. The photographic image became the focus of his artistic and professional life. He worked for nearly a decade as a freelance photojournalist covering daily news, sports and special interest stories for the Associated Press in Miami. His photographs have been published in newspapers and magazines around the world.
Yet throughout his career as a photojournalist, he continued to use scuba diving and the ocean as his escape from the business of photography. Ironically, it also proved a good excuse for long weekends in the Florida Keys. It was in the Keys that his two passions, diving and photography, began to merge. Notably, it is also where he learned how quickly twenty dollars can get you a table at the Half Shell Raw Bar.
Somehow, Chicago winters, Key West nights, Miami riots, campy television shows, and rum drinks have conspired, along with trips to the aquarium, a genuine love of fine art photography, and a passion for the oceans and their denizens to produce Goddesses, Sirens and Mermaids. Don't try to figure it out. Todd quit trying years ago. To this day, it all seems like a long, strange, but not unpleasant dream. Like something out of the sixties.
