Every Saturday morning, just before 8:00 a.m., up to 40 men and women park their cars and walk towards Serpentine Lake situated in the 390 green acres of the British capital's largest central open space, Hyde Park...

The Serpentine Swimming Club is a tribe, and I wanted to show them in an almost anthropological way reminiscent of the formal 19th-century portraits that documented racial and social groups...

This is a temporary tribe that exists for only half an hour a week in the very heart of one of the great cities in the world, assembling when most are tucked in bed. And like a sect, they return after their baptism purified but unnoticed to their separate lives.

Andrew Buurman
From the FotoFest 2004 Catalogue