Pacific Dreamstates by Oriana Poindexter
There’s nothing quite like the way freediving makes you feel. The first few dives are probing, perfunctory, as you absorb the sensory input to build an environment around you. As you get warmer (or colder), you go deeper, stay longer, grab a rock, look up, look around…but there’s no way to take in everything.
Photography began, for me, with the camera as an excuse to explore my surroundings. Exploring the underwater world with a 35 year old mechanical film camera with no light meter is a questionable way to make photographs in today’s digital, high-resolution world. Film photography, with its inherent elements of chance, luck, and accident, is the most appropriate way for me to illustrate the feeling of the Pacific Ocean, seen from below - silent but so alive, serene yet profoundly haunting, the depths alternately shimmering with light or impenetrable with life.
