There’s something otherworldly about Christy Lee Rogers’ work — a kind of luminous chaos that blurs the lines between painting and photography. Her images, often compared to the grandeur of Baroque masters, aren’t the product of brushes or canvas. Instead, they’re born beneath the surface of water, where light bends, movement slows, and humans become mythic figures suspended between worlds.
Rogers, a Hawaii-born photographer, has spent years mastering the unpredictable nature of underwater photography. Her process defies the digital ease of contemporary image-making. Everything — the color, texture, even the folds of fabric — happens in-camera. No Photoshop, no compositing. Just refracted light and the graceful distortion of bodies in motion. The result: scenes that evoke Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and Rubens’ sweeping drama, yet belong entirely to her own universe.
In series like Muses and Reclamation, Rogers transforms her subjects into floating narratives of vulnerability and transcendence. Her work invites viewers to look past the surface — literally and metaphorically — and confront the dualities of chaos and calm, despair and rebirth. The figures seem to wrestle with invisible forces, their gestures suspended between falling and ascending, grief and grace. It’s both human and divine — a visual hymn to the resilience and fragility of the body.
