There is a beautiful sequence in Paolo Sorrentino's Italian film The Great Beauty, in which a character photographs himself every day for years. The images are simple, almost bare: merely a record of time passing, the same face framed again and again in different moments. Each photograph is ordinary, a fragment of everyday life, yet together they suggest a quiet truth: parts of us disappear each day, only to re-emerge the following morning in a slightly different form. There is melancholy in this idea, but also freedom—a reminder that we are always becoming, always undergoing subtle transformation.

As I learned to move through the water and gradually felt more at ease in it, I sought every opportunity to work with photographers. Beyond competitions and records, the water became a mirror in which I could observe the woman I was slowly becoming. During those years of intense travel and experiences through freediving, photography, together with my daily writing, became an external archive of memory, capturing the passage of time and preserving fragments of myself that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Every photograph and every written page allowed me to trace subtle transformations, creating a quiet space from which to explore who I was from the outside.

There are images of ordinary training days, of focus and tension before competitions, and of the release that followed. Split-shot photography, made possible by the curved domes of underwater housings, allowed the surface and the depths, air and water, to coexist within a single frame—the visible and the invisible in dialogue. Then there were the carefully composed portraits, built around the simple act of remaining suspended underwater on a single breath.

The most demanding photographs were those taken without a mask, goggles, or nose clip, often less than a metre below the surface. Appearing calm in those images required a kind of invisible effort. Salt water entered my sinuses and could sometimes lead to infections if it wasn't thoroughly rinsed away afterwards, while my lungs had to be partially emptied to prevent me from immediately floating back to the surface. Without a mask, my vision dissolved into shapes and shadows, yet I still had to maintain an expression that conveyed familiarity and ease within the aquatic world. What appears effortless in the final image was often the result of careful control and repeated attempts.

Each photographer brought their own interpretation of the person they perceived me to be. The complexity and subtlety of my personality took on different nuances through each individual lens, revealing themes I had never confronted so directly before. Through these images, I explored femininity and strength, lightness and gravity, weightlessness and independence, presence and mystery. It became a genuinely creative act, guided by an architectural sense of aesthetics, in which form, light, and shadow merged and layered upon one another.

This collection of photographs gradually became a kind of map—not of achievements or depths reached, but of an inner landscape slowly taking shape.

Whether I was among the vibrant coral reefs of the Red Sea or suspended in the luminous stillness of shallow waters, each image held the same quiet search: to understand who I was becoming, one suspended moment at a time. Taken together, these photographs became a visual diary of transformation—a testament to a self learning where it truly belongs.