WHERE LIGHT BENDS

I began photographing underwater almost by accident. I had spent years working on the street — reading bodies, anticipating gestures, chasing the unrepeatable instant — and at some point I became curious whether those instincts could survive beneath the surface. Could I find the same aliveness down there?

The answer, quickly, was no. And that failure became the project.

Underwater, the rules I had learned on land stopped working. Light bends, scatters, refracts through particles and movement. The camera loses its authority. Colour retreats into a narrow palette of greens and blues, broken only by the warm glow of skin when a shaft of sunlight finds it from above. I stopped trying to control the image and started listening to what the water was doing with the light.

What emerged was a series with its own internal rhythm — beginning at the threshold where sky and sea meet in the same frame, descending through turbulence and near-abstraction, before returning slowly to the surface. The images that move me most are the ones where the human form is barely present, dissolved into water and light, softened into something almost otherworldly. The sea, it turns out, is a remarkable collaborator.

Where Light Bends is an ongoing project.