Surface Tension

“I never realized that so many Chinese people have tattoos,” says photographer Xu Song, who spent the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016 photographing people at outdoor swimming pools in Beijing with his phone. “When the clothes come off, the secrets come out.” For Xu, pools provide “a summer outlet for the emotions” of the swimmers. Like the water that spills through them, Xu’s photographs both clarify and obscure his subjects, playing with surface and depth, forcing us to see the strangeness in familiar scenes and gestures, and daring us to wonder what might remain submerged.

—The Editors