The Nereids are sea nymphs, all the daughters of Nereus and Doris. Some traditions hold that there are fifty of them. Other traditions count more. The most famous depiction of a Nereid is Triumph of Galatea, 1541, by Raphael. However, the most famous Nereid is not Galatea, but instead Thetis, the mother of Achilles.
As with many Greek stories, the origin of Achilles' birth begins in prophecy. Zeus was told that the son of the nymph Thetis would be greater than his father. It made sense, therefore, that Zeus arrange for Thetis to have a child by way of a human. Olympus was hard won and even harder protected. No risk could be taken in mating Thetis with a God.
The trouble was that the human chosen, Peleus, was rejected by Thetis and not even Zeus and Poseidon together could broker the match. It was advised that Peleus wrangle the nymph, but in much the same way the nymph knew the wilds of the sea and therefore could help the sailors of the Aegean to safe harbors, thus she could mimic that same wildness, shifting from fire to water to animal without limit, as the sea itself is never the same.
Taking the advice of an older god, Proteus, Peleus waited till the nymph was asleep, presumably when the waters were calm. Riding the shape shifting sea nymph until she relented, she agreed to marry him and from their union, Achilles the hero was born. Achilles would rage at Troy and eventually would be driven to an even deeper rage by the death of his friend Patroclus.
Elger Esser is often distinguished from his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, because, instead of taking up their conceptual rigor (showing the beauty and decline of German industrial infrastructure through series of photographs of hundreds of buildings in grids), Esser was drawn into more traditional avenues of photography. While photographers like Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth document a world filling with people, retaining the nuance of the Becher vision, Esser continues the depopulated visions of lonely landscapes handed down to him from the romantics.
However, the stated differences between Esser and the Becher school is merely an exercise in boutique classification. As the world fills, the populated explosion of a warming world must necessarily impact the world's lonely corners. Esser has always shown the quiet and blunted echo of the changing environment found Gursky and Struth's spectacles. Esser's other classmate, Candida Höfer, presents the same echo, only in the silence of empty rooms.
There is a difference between presenting who we are now as Gursky and Struth do, and the stranger attempt at prophecy found in Höfer and Esser. There is no need in Esser to digitally expand the world to show the world. Instead, he goes looking for Nereids. He goes looking for the one whose son may be stronger than his father. What he finds is a crashing, changing sea that has never crashed the same way twice. What he finds is the same sea, historically negotiated and never mastered, now rising due to what humans have wrought.
Each photograph, each Nereid, shows water crashing against the same retaining wall. The vantage point is flat, consistent, and dead-pan as the subject matter changes. Esser's series records a world that is never the same twice as Monet's haystacks do, yet also shows a world changing because of us, as the Bechers did with their grids. These two impulses join a third. Esser too speaks to the way that Nereids most often appear in art, dancing in a line across the surfaces of Greek pottery. As the nymphs change, thus our rituals of eating and drinking, living and dying, necessarily continue as well.
One of the most beautiful scenes in all of literature is in the Iliad, where Thetis entreats the deformed Hephaestus, the god of craftsman, to make armor for her son to protect him in battle, that he may avenge the death of his friend, which in bitter irony, was brought about by his own original anger and neglect. Hephaestus agrees and not only creates the armor but also the famed shield of Achilles, the design of which depicts the rituals of ancient world.
Does the shape shifting Thetis entreat us now through Esser? Do these photographs ask deformed gods (maybe our leaders) to protect a world put upon by original angers and neglects, the hubris of industry towards nature?
The Bechers and Esser, in the end, tell the same story. Esser's Nereides is a damn fine series of photographs. They show what has always been now changed by what is. They show how a copy of the Iliad can come to matter in a darkroom in Düsseldorf. And as for the seas, they continue to rise.
“Now you must plunge
into the broad lap of Ocean and go find
the Old Man of the Sea in our father’s house.
Tell him everything. I’ll go to high Olympus,
to that famous artisan Hephaestus,
to see if he is willing to give my son
some splendid glittering armour.”
Iliad, Book 18