The Shedd Aquarium becomes part of an unexpected visual conversation in photographer Elizabeth Waterman’s latest body of work, Propulsion, which pairs jellyfish with pole dancers in a series of analog photographic diptychs exploring movement, strength and vulnerability.
Waterman, a Los Angeles-based artist with Chicago ties, photographed the jellyfish at Shedd and paired them with images of pole dancers captured in Los Angeles. The result is a set of twelve diptychs that find surprising visual echoes between bodies moving through water and bodies moving through air.
Created entirely on cross-processed analog film in both 35mm and 120mm formats, the images were made without post-production manipulation. That limitation is part of the project’s appeal: the relationships between dancer and jellyfish come from gesture, color, form, and timing rather than digital construction.
One pairing places Shimmey, photographed mid-air at Polemasters Playhouse in West Hollywood, alongside a Pacific sea nettle photographed at Shedd. The dancer’s suspended body, captured during a technically demanding flip, mirrors the jellyfish’s drifting bell and trailing tentacles.
The connection is less literal than instinctive.
“This project contrasts the movements of jellyfish — some of the most ancient beings on the planet — with the dynamic, expressive artistry of pole dancers,” Waterman shared. “They each occupy distinct yet parallel spheres of propulsion: one driven by the natural ebb and flow of the ocean, the other by the raw power and finesse of the human form.”
That idea runs throughout the series.
Waterman describes the work as an evolution of her long-running exploration of dancers, performers and the ways women are seen. Earlier projects such as Moneygame and Candyland used portraiture and documentary observation to challenge reductive views of dancers and other performers. Propulsion shifts toward something more abstract and formally constructed.
The dancers and jellyfish occupy radically different worlds, but Waterman finds commonality in the way each appears suspended between gravity and weightlessness, control and surrender. Limbs and tentacles extend, curl and drift in corresponding rhythms.
“Beauty is the point of entry, not the conclusion,” Waterman writes of the project.
That distinction matters. The dancer is not reduced to spectacle, and the jellyfish is not presented merely as natural ornament. Instead, Waterman gives both subjects presence and agency, using the diptychs to examine sensuality, adaptation, vulnerability and survival.
For Chicago audiences, the Shedd connection gives the project an especially local resonance. One of the city’s most familiar cultural institutions becomes the source of half the visual language in a project that ultimately traveled to an international stage.
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Twelve diptychs from Propulsion were presented by Albumen Gallery at Photo London 2026, and a monograph of the series is scheduled to be published internationally by Skira in 2027.
Waterman’s work has previously been exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Sydney and Los Angeles, and has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times, British Journal of Photography, Creative Boom and L’Oeil de la Photographie.
With Propulsion, she turns Shedd’s jellyfish into something more than aquarium subjects.
They become dancers themselves.
