Hydrophobia

A series on the irrational fear of the underwater unknown

Hydrophobia began as a formal constraint — a single theme from which a complete visual language had to be built. Water was chosen not for its surface beauty, but for what lies unresolved within it: the reflections that distort, the depths that withhold, the stillness that feels borrowed.

The series constructs a specific, visceral dread — the kind that surfaces when you swim alone at night and sense that the darkness beneath you is not empty. Each image is built around the presence of an unseen force: something submerged, something waiting. A couple enters the water. The water does not return them whole.

The project is not horror through spectacle. It works instead through restraint — through the suggestion of what the frame refuses to show, through compositions that feel irrecoverably off-balance. What remains after the series is not an image, but an unease.