From the early 1970s to the early ’80s, the conceptual artist and photographer Larry Sultan repeatedly outfitted himself with goggles, an underwater camera and a hand-held flash and submerged himself in community pools across the San Francisco Bay Area. Influenced by the images he found in a Red Cross manual, he photographed underwater scenes of parents teaching their children to swim, lone swimmers treading water and people playing and holding their breath under the surface.

In this predigital era, Sultan didn’t know the outcome of a shot until it was developed. As his subjects moved, the water distorted the images. The resulting photos in SWIMMERS (MACK, $65), taken between 1978 and 1982, are lyrical, dreamlike dances, and also documents of American life.

“These pictures were made at a time when I found that much of my artistic activity was cut off from my body,” Sultan, who died in 2009, said in an artist’s statement.

“Larry began ‘Swimmers’ with a very literal fear of deep water and of drowning,” the art historian Philip Gefter writes in the book. Gradually the photographer pushed himself from the shallow end into the deep end, toward images he described as “excessively physical, sensual and painterly” even as their abstractness made him feel, in Gefter’s words, “self-conscious and exposed” — presumably like the swimmers themselves.