Bartolomeo Celestino has been returning to a particular section of
Sydney's coastal fringe – atop an otherwise unremarkable set of cliffs
in the eastern suburb of Bronte – day after day, year after year, to
undertake the protracted task of setting up his large-format camera and
training his lens downward to the fierce waters below.

In the images
that populate his debut book Surface Phenomena, the horizon, the land or
any other contextual details are absent; the ocean is everything and
everywhere. The mass of turbulence and white water and the deft flashes
of calm that these photographs describe occupy a fundamentally different
formal and conceptual space to the iconography of the Australian coast.
His mode of practice might just as proficiently be read through the
late Modernist prism of seriality. Without the luxury of context –
without foreground and horizon – Celestino's images become loaded with
formal, allegorical and interpretive potential. We can only begin to
approach an understanding of the nature of our chosen subject through a
process of assiduous repetition.