Stephan Zirwes Focusing on the Privatisation of Public Pools

Pools is a photography series by Stephan Zirwes that turns swimming pools into sharp graphic studies while raising a pointed question about water as a shared resource. Begun in 2015, the project frames private and public pools through lines, forms and patterns, drawing attention to water wastage in a world where the same liquid is treated both as a basic need and as a luxury. The aerial view flattens each pool into something close to a rendered plan, an effect that feels familiar to anyone trained to read architectural drawings.

To make the images, Zirwes photographed from a helicopter a hundred meters above the ground. The distance was a deliberate choice: privacy mattered to him, and he did not want to disturb the people below. From that height a pool stops reading as a place to swim and becomes a clean geometric object, its edges, tiles and surrounding decks reduced to color and shape. The strong idea behind the work is the waste of water. Zirwes noticed the rising number of private pools in the United States and South Africa, where commercial exploitation turned water into an entertainment tool. Against that privatization he defended the public pool as part of socio-cultural life, a place where access to water is collective rather than fenced off.

Reading a pool from above

The swimming pool has long been a charged piece of design, signaling leisure, status and the control of water in both public bath culture and private gardens. Seen from the air, its rectangles and kidney shapes line up with the logic of a site plan, which is why the photographs read so easily as architecture. Aerial photography has a habit of doing this, stripping away the human scale and revealing pattern, repetition and the way built form sits on the land. The series sits within a wider conversation about water conservation, a concern that grows more urgent as cities weigh recreation against scarcity.

During post production Zirwes copied the pool tiles and extended them into the background, building a frame and an atmosphere around each subject. After editing, the clear forms and aesthetic images settle into a flat, two dimensional plane. The result is part document, part abstraction: a body of work that asks viewers to admire the geometry and, in the same glance, to consider what all that water is for.