Although I’m someone who tries to paint with all the crayons in the box, years ago I fell in love with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes. In his photographic portraits of bodies of water around the world, the artist restricts his palette to black and white and the worlds of grey between the two.

And so I am beatific to have had the opportunity to write what is, one part, a love letter to Sugimoto’s Seascapes and, another part, a polemic against coding water as only blue for Water Cultures, a trilingual exploration of what it’s like to write watery worlds from a slew of disciplines.

Edited by Charlotte Ladevèze, Davide Martino, Eva Rothenberger, and Corinne Fournier Kiss, and published by the University of Fribourg, the book is—hurray!—open access and free to download here. And a thousand thanks to Sugimoto’s Studio for generously gifting my chapter some of his Seascapes.