Richard Silberman Goes ‘Below the Surface’

Armed with a basic camera and goggles, Richard Silberman explores the eerie depths of the Outer Cape’s kettle ponds in “Below the Surface,” a show of 20 of his photographs at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, opening Saturday, June 19th and running through July 15th at 335 Main St.

Silberman often casts himself in the images — an anonymous, murky protagonist in a sometimes harmonious, sometimes fraught relationship with nature. “Where do we end? Where does nature begin?” Silberman asks in a press release. “How does this environment transform a person, and how does our presence transform the environment?”

Some photographs glow with an ethereal alien light; others are dark, ominous, and unknowable. Yet all feel remarkably alive — a rhythmic dance of water and aquatic plants generating more questions than answers.