Robert Flynt, a New York-based artist and photographer, began shooting clothed and nude figures, primarily male, underwater in the mid-1980s. Compound Fracture gathers that work in an artist-designed volume published by Twin Palms Publishers in June 1997: 96 pages, 62 four-color plates, 7 by 9 inches. The photographs show bodies suspended in a medium that refuses them solid ground, and the publisher describes the images as providing a new context for viewing the human form in relation to other bodies, space, and history.

Flynt used a variety of specialized, then-analog printing techniques, including multiple exposure. The publisher states that his nudes summon feelings of loss or the rapturous movement of sexual encounter, and that his work reconsiders traditional notions of beauty by entering unfamiliar depths that foster sensual immersion in the viewer. The sequence thus treats the body as layered and unstable rather than merely posed.

Flynt designed the book himself, making its physical presentation part of his involvement in the project. The publisher records an American Institute of Graphic Arts Best Book Award for the publication. Within the book, the underwater subject and the layered photographic methods can be considered together, offering a way to look at the relationship between a body and its representation.

Its subject also earns it sustained attention. Photography of men, photography of the nude, underwater photography, and photomontage meet in these pages without the book belonging comfortably to any one category. Flynt’s figures are bodies in relation: to one another, to water, and to the history of the nude. The book holds that relation open, asking viewers to reconsider inherited ideas of beauty and to enter unfamiliar depths.