The Devil’s Pool is a roughly 15-foot-deep by 25-foot-wide basin of water tucked within Wissahickon Valley Park (so named by the Leni Lenape people, whose territory included much of the Delaware River Valley) located in Northwest Philadelphia, USA. But, if you google “Devil’s Pool,” the aforementioned pool does not appear. Instead, you will find “Devil’s Pool, Victoria Falls.” You will read that it is “a tourist attraction in Zambia.” It is open from 7:30am to 5pm. The first images of this place that appear are of some men in swimming trunks and women in bikinis. Some are looking over falls into the abyss and spray of the 345-foot drop. By contrast, “the falls” at Wissahickon are 15 feet high at best. It has no “open” hours, because it is illegal to swim there. Who would bother with such an insignificant pool? Photographer Sarah Kaufman, Assistant professor of Art and Art History in Photography at Ursinus College (located about 30 minutes by car from Philadelphia’s Devil’s Pool), thought that this inland body of water was so important that she spent more than seven years of her life (2014-2020) on this book project and untold sums of money on color negative film that she ran through her Rolleiflex. Devil’s Pool, published in 2021 by Daylight Books is the outcome of this effort.

O’Neill, Brian F. 2022. “Thinking with Sarah Kaufman’s Devil’s Pool.” Visual Studies. Online first at https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2062043 .