In 1978, Larry Sultan set aside the collaborative conceptual work that had made his name and carried his camera into public pools around San Francisco. Over the next several years he photographed people learning to swim. A group of black-and-white documentary photographs in a Red Cross swimming manual first prompted the series, but the pictures soon pushed toward something more bodily, sensuous, immersive, and painterly. Water acts as a second lens; its refractions bend bodies into chance abstractions. The images are saturated with color, often beautiful and just as often unsettled by ambiguity.

Swimmers, published by MACK in 2023, gathers all the photographs from the series that Sultan himself selected and exhibited. It also expands the sequence with additional images he marked on contact sheets and further selections from his archive that he likely never reviewed. At 144 pages, in a debossed hardcover, the book gives this body of work a coherent and deliberate shape while preserving the openness of an unfinished archive.

For a serious collector, the significance lies in the specific historical and editorial situation. Sultan made these photographs between 1978 and 1982, at a moment when he was turning away from collaborative conceptual practice toward direct, embodied, color image-making. The book holds two kinds of judgment together: the artist’s own final selection and the later, more speculative additions from contact sheets and archive material. It is a concentrated record of a photographer testing what a picture can feel like underwater—fluid, uncertain, and alive to distortion.