The Atlantic Museum (aka descend to ascend and shoot in the meantime)

2017 was bad year for me. Except that my nephew was born, and that tiny face (now a big beautiful boy) rebalances the scale of doom that year brought upon me. Better said, that I brought upon myself by making very bad choices.
Anyway. This is – thankfully – not a self improvement blog but a photography blog, so let’s see what the disastrous emotional state I was in led me and my camera to.
Come September I resembled a ghost. I had not been sleeping for months, I had picked up smoking again, I was pale and thin and scary (this last one according to reliable sources). I bet I was scary, I was scared. Better yet: terrified. Existential dread and emotional spook were all around me.
So what to do when lost in the woods?
Face your fear, dive into it, pretend you are stronger than it until you actually become strong.

To fear or not to fear

It is a habit of mine of periodically, maybe once a year, do something I am afraid of in order to overcome a little bit of my own limitations. This ritual was kicked off by a random giant spider I met in India in 2013. Facing him took away my fear of spiders, at least of the small European ones. I now name them and treat them as pets, while only a few years ago I would leave the room if spotted even a tiny arachnid on the wall.
That fatal year, 2017, deserved a total immersion in fear, so I decided to literally dive. Scuba dive, to be more precise.
I am not exactly claustrophobic but I am a very earthy person. I dislike flying, I dislike sailing, I don’t like heights and prefer a safe, level plane to mountain peaks. I love caves (later that week I visited some exceptional ones that I’ll post here), I love to swim but prefer tiny lakes to the enormity of the sea. Let alone the Ocean. That I have huge, paralysing respect for. So that’s where I headed.
In September 2017 I boarded a plane to Lanzarote and drove straight to the southern side of the island, determined to visit the Atlantic Museum. Being a total novice I had to take a scuba diving crash course, during which I was shown the basic security measures to not die 12m under or while ascending.
The nice people of the Dive College Lanzarote gave me a diving suit, an oxygen tank and, after class, took me out with a group of about 10 people to visit the museum.
Now, the suit was very tight, and I got slightly seasick on the dinghy already, but obviously I ignored it. Then we dove in.
I realise the story so far has not been so inviting, but believe me: to visit these sculptures, placed 12m under the ocean’s surface by artist Jason deCaires Taylor, is worth every sea sickness, fear and panic in the world.

The Atlantic Museum

The sculpture park is really big, me and my clumsy moves didn’t even see all of it. I could tell that my more experienced travel companions were swimming and moving faster and enjoying a much better view. I was dedicating half my brain power to bare survival. The other half was taking photographs.
I had equipped myself for the occasion with a small underwater action camera, which turned out not to be a champion. The quality of the images is not amazing. Plus the angles were not exactly a choice, they were more like “more or less… let’s see if I can reach there… let’s see if I am able to stand here… oh no, I am floating away”.
Nevertheless, I am very attached to these photographs. They remind me that I could do it, and made me shift into making better choices later that year.
When we ascended again, I cracked. A few meters before reaching the surface, Panic got the best of me. I hyperventilated all the way back to shore.
Then I got my shit together, dusted myself off, and felt stronger every day.
I recently was reminded of these photos by the Aminus3’s community weekly photography prompt on Substack. I decided to post them all here as I quite proudly look back at the road I’ve walked over the past eight years.