For the last six years, Blau has been photographing the Milwaukee River from the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge, arresting its flow to consider the ways that sun, sky, clouds, wind and currents all interact at a particular instant. The pictures are not representational, at least in any conventional sense. They look at what is there but what cannot normally be seen…except through the mind and camera’s eyes.
WATER/ύδωρ (27 minutes c/s) is a video version of this larger project, titled The Same River Twice. It is a collaboration with composer Kornelios Diamantopoulos, whose music is inspired by his love of the Peneois River, which runs through Thessaly, the heartland of Greece. The work had its world premiere in 2025 at the Open Nights Festival in Larissa, Greece. This is its American premiere.
Dick Blau (BA Harvard 1965; PhD Yale 1973) is Professor Emeritus and co-founder of the UWM Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres. He is the author of six photo books and numerous films on many different subjects: from interpersonal family dynamics to the music and culture of the Roma of northern Greece. Covering a wide number of subjects and styles, Blau’s work ranges across the genres -- from documentaries to fairy tales to studies in pure abstraction. Blau’s films show internationally and his photographs can be found in major collections both here and abroad: in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Thessaloniki Museum of Contemporary Art, and locally at MAM and MOWA.
