To request beach holiday brochures from a desert country might seem a rather odd thing to do, even if one is researching depictions of bathers in advertisement photography, as Thomas Zika has done for his recent series Bathers. He requested water-related tourist material from every country in the world, browsing them for bird’s-eye (or, as he points out, god’s-eye) images of people lolloping around in the deep blue sea, swimming or drifting lazily, or cradling themselves as they welter in the soft waves.

In Zika’s pictures, however, little remains of such joyful splashing about in the sun: rephotographing details of the advertisements with heavy macro lenses and then digitally rendering them, he drains the images of those vivid colours and bright, happy holiday promises that the leaflets they stem from are littered with. The now visible bluish-grey print marks that the eye otherwise pieces together to form a mass of glistening waves and that visual habit has us interpret as that desire-laden concept of ocean, emanate a desolate tranquility associated, curiously, with a stony and forsaken desert rather than with seaside holidays, a notion enhanced by the fact that the water appears distinctly un-wet. And while, in spite of the loss of its most important characteristic, the sea itself remains easily identifiable as such, the people within are reduced to barely distinguishable heaps of print dots.

Even if — and maybe because — in every photo of the series a single strip of clear focus lies upon one of these assemblies of human-shaped dots, a general air of indefiniteness deflects every attempt at a closer look: the images reveal no more information than can be grasped at first glance and prevent the viewer from indulging completely in what is represented. Perception lingers between the vast chain of happy holiday associations provided by the theme of swimming in the sea on the one hand and, on the other, the obvious rejection of exactly these notions brought about by the strangely dry pictorial language that the continuous alteration through reproduction has resulted in.

In these images, there are no horizons the eye can cling to (as it does when relishing the salty endlessness of blue on blue), occasionally visible bits of beach are blurred to almost abstract forms and the freedom-promising vastness turns into an uneasy void, as Thomas Zika redirects the view away from the dreamy notion of the seaside that the original photographs were intended to sell, away even from the ocean and lost-looking bathers in his photos themselves.

What is it, exactly, that we see? Before the image finally meets our eyes, the original vacationer has been photographed, printed, photographed again, digitally rendered, and finally printed again. It is perception through a fivefold lens, and much has changed since someone really felt the water’s wetness on their skin.