Swimming pool-themed coffee-table books are a surprising amount of time in the publishing industry. A medley of splashes and bodies practically lunges at the reader from these lavish, glossy, and tempting books, which are almost like pop-up books in their presentation. The fact that they don't appear to be particularly serious suggests that they would make an excellent winter gift, assuming that you can withstand the tantalizing prospect of aquatic pleasure while it's freezing cold, raining, or snowing outside.

The most recent entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppard's Pools, which comes from Rizzoli, the house of lavishness itself. To be consistent with the editor of most such books, Stoppard uses a light hand and a limited word count in his book. He includes only a few well-chosen paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. What, however, are they saying? Rizzoli has wrapped the cover in a transparent blue sleeve that has a latex-like feel to it in order to distinguish it from several other books of a similar nature. This slightly kinky touch gives the impression that the book is submerged in water, spa pool swim beckoning the reader to dive in. Several of the photographs included in Stoppard's collection have already been published in recent books, such as Hatje Cantz's stunning collection of classic twentieth-century photographs, The Swimming Pool in Photography (2018). Stoppard, on the other hand, juxtaposes iconic pool images with contemporary pool photography, allowing the viewer to see how the cultural imagination of the swimming pool has evolved over time.

These seemingly innocuous exercise machines, these seemingly inconsequential additions to luxury vacation packages, have a rich and diverse cultural history."Enjoy your workout!" yells my friendly neighborhood pool attendant just as I'm about to step into the pool. When I hear this aggressively cheerful exhortation, I cringe because swimming is so much more than just exercise for me. An extremely deliberate process of transformation is involved in this type of ritual: the careful, even fetishistic shedding of a quotidian skin is part of the process. No one needs to believe the Freudian notion that swimming enacts a return to the womb and some form of prelapsarian amniotic nirvana in order to appreciate that bathing was originally used as a component of religious ritual in the ancient world, and that the act has not entirely lost its aura as a baptismal rite. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan's Sindh province, which dates back to the third millennium BCE, Fibreglass Swimming Pool appears to have encouraged bathing for precisely this reason, and it continues to be an archaeological site of significant historical significance. Pools were built by the ancient Greeks and Romans for athletic purposes, to be sure, but they were also used for a variety of other purposes, including ritualized social bathing and the keeping of fish, which gave rise to the term piscine.

As a result, our modern conception of the swimming pool as an exercise machine and an Olympic venue is rooted in a rich and complicated global history. Bathing was considered a savage activity by Europeans in the early modern era; Africans and Asians, on the other hand, were brilliant divers whose abilities Europeans could only barely comprehend, let alone emulate. Swimming was rediscovered and embraced as a mass activity by Westerners around the turn of the twentieth century, and it was done so with a dramatic sense of rediscovery and rapture. Swimming was the subject of André Breton's eulogy for "the voluptuousness of swimming," which he wrote after declaring himself "born under the sign of Pisces." Breton was the avatar of the Surrealist movement. According to him, swimming not only changed one's body but also transformed one's mind, liberating it from the confines of rationalistic thought and allowing it to experience a more authentic dimension of imaginative consciousness.

The juxtapositions of classic and contemporary photographs by Lou Stoppard suggest how the cultural significance of the swimming pool has shifted over the century since Breton's invention. Take, for example, the meticulously curated double-page spread that follows in this post. The portrait of Marie Helvin by Jacques-Henri Lartigue at the Eden Roc Hotel pool in the French Riviera, taken in 1977, is displayed on one side of the book. On the other side is a photograph of Marie Helvin taken in 1977 by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. On the one hand, it's just another glamour shot, complete with a well-known photographer, a top model, and a luxurious setting. The picture, on the other hand, is exquisitely realized, a vision of ecstasy. Helvin has her head thrown back and her eyes closed, and her expression is serene. It's impossible to look away from her as her jet-black locks bob and dance in the water. A dazzling record of the play of light on her chest is captured in the portrait, which traces wild light lines across her skin, which appears to be swabbed in a pool of sunlit Jell-O. Lartigue captures the paradox of erotic desire as innocent bliss in Helvin's deeply private sense of repose and pleasure, which is a deeply personal experience for him.

Stoppard reproduces two bright and striking images by Karine Laval, taken in 2010 and placed directly opposite this blast from the past. Laval refers to these photographs as Poolscapes. Four and a half decades after Helvin's hedonistic headshot at Eden Roc, Laval's photographs provide little in the way of anatomical, social, or geographical information. Even in the titles of these photographs, no specifics about the location or person depicted are considered important. Laval's works are not representations of swimming pools in the traditional sense, but rather an experiment in the creation of disorienting chromatic-aquatic effects. There is a submerged human figure, dressed in red, that appears to be in some sort of agitated pose, similar to that of a cubist minotaur fighting against the currents. Splashes of light and color hurl themselves at the viewer's eyes as the image comes to life in front of them. They sever the humanoid form, cutting it into pieces with their brittle and crystalline hands: everything that is soft breaks apart into lines. If this is a photograph of a swimming pool, you'd never guess it because Laval has abstracted it into a series of tones, lines, and ripples that look nothing like a pool. Our journey has taken us far away from Breton's "voluptuousness of swimming" and Helvin's fleshy ecstasies. The question is how and why this is happening.