A new book compiles the most iconic photographs of pools.

The most memorable photo in The Swimming Pool In Photography (Hatje Cantz, out now) is of a Cadillac that’s been drunkenly “parked” in a Beverly Hills swimming pool. The car, by trick of underwater refraction, is unfeasibly long; it seems to fill the entire pool. Four men look on – one standing at the top of the steps poised to climb in – all wondering what the hell to do to get it out of there.

Ms Joan Didion once wrote that swimming pools were a symbol of “control over the uncontrollable”. She also thought that, far from being a trapping of affluence, pools were ultimately “useful” things. The Swimming Pool In Photography furthers her case for the pool as a functional (and multi-functional) object – from swimmers test-evacuating a sunken plane at the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City, to a photograph from 2012 of the pool at New York’s Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel. Abandoned since the 1980s, its dry interior is now filled with graffiti.

As well as artists armed with spray paint, the potential of abandoned pools didn’t escape skateboarders in the mid-1970s either. A combination of drought and home foreclosures meant many Californian pools lay empty in the summer of 1976. Kidney-shaped pools – with rounded bottoms rather than conventional angular sides – had recently taken off as an LA must-have, and this rounded bowl shape proved ideal for skateboarding. You might say that the empty pools of California helped secure the future of skateboarding, which was still then in its infancy.

When we’re in the midst of a heatwave, though, it’s hard to think of pools as anything other than places to swim. This collection of photographs emphasises that even when it isn’t filled with water, the swimming pool is remarkably versatile as both design object and site of activity. Envy-inducing images of sleek Alicante pools are accompanied by photographs of retro swimmers in 1960s costumes. Incidentally, the book also does a good job of tracking not just the evolution of swimming pool design, but of swimwear too – spare a thought for the women of Mount Vernon Seminary and College in the 1920s, who had to take to the water in swimming costumes akin to dresses.

As Professor Francis Hodgson, the book’s author, puts it: “The swimming pool has been at different times and places suburban, exotic, utterly private, boisterously public, a threat or a blessing.” The Swimming Pool In Photography is a reminder of just how multifaceted pools are as a cultural and everyday phenomenon: from getting up early to save sun loungers with towels at a Benidorm resort, to the Californian glamour of an infinity pool (submerged car or otherwise), there’s something worth thinking about next time you go for a swim.

The Swimming Pool In Photography (Hatje Cantz) is out now