Photographer Sveta Kaverina is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘I am the Sea’. To see Sveta’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The project relates the author’s special connections to the sea and swimming. Since childhood, the sea has been a symbolic environment for the author, from which she draws psychological certainty and support. Swimming, physically overcoming the expanse of the sea, becomes a metaphor for the path to oneself, an accessible way of reassembling one’s personality, a simple way to look into one’s own depth.

Endowed with high symbolic meaning, the images of the sea act in the same space as the artist’s dreams and childhood memories. This habitable, tamed space of the irrational is not hostile to her — it collaborates. And every real journey to the sea, the opportunity to enter its waters and swim far from the shore allows her once more to be in close proximity with herself and her creative beginnings.

Artist Statement 

When I approach my camera, I never know what will happen next. Even when I have an idea, a project, a series in my mind. Even when I get this itching inside me that tells me, it is coming, a photograph is about to reveal. Even then everything can happen to me, I am not protected from anything, I am ready for nothing, I capitulate in advance.

This gap between reality and its photo representation is a rabbit hole I cannot help slipping into. I’m mesmerized by my power to transform something normal, familiar to everyone’s eye — into something extraordinary, something no one, not even me, has ever seen before; into an eye wonder. Into something that simply didn’t exist before I first saw it.

It’s the sense of my humble wonderment over the camera’s ethereal powers that makes me keep experimenting with long exposure, surrealism in pictures, deconstructing common shapes and traits.

Using extremely long exposures I try to test the reality, I give it more time to manifest itself, to show up. I pretend that I turned away and got out of the room, and I leave my camera to spy for me — when I’m back it will tell me what was happening to the -real- when I didn’t witness it.

This wondrous trick the camera does with reality works for me as evidence of the divine and the mundane co-presence in our life. Can the artist ever get a larger reward than this sort of evidence?

All images and text © Sveta Kaverina