Ten years ago, while visiting family in Valsad, a southern coastal town of Gujarat in India, an uncle lent his nephew, Jay Patel, a small camera to capture pictures. Nine years later Jay graduated from the Creative Practices program at the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York. Jay’s work, Diving into the Unknown, is a personal project as a result of his time at the ICP and is about water and swimming. It is a collection of work where he turned the lens onto his own life and shares childhood experience with water and a journey to overcome fear.
“I taught myself to swim,” says Jay. “As a kid we had compulsory swimming lessons. When I was young, I was sent to small pools where the water wasn’t that deep, but then after a couple of years it led to being thrown into deep water. It was a bad experience for me and after that I would make all sorts of excuses not to swim. I would get my mum to write notes that I wasn’t well enough.” Jay skipped swimming for almost seven years until he saw people swimming and having fun in the water. “Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I had first thought, maybe I could learn in my own way,” he says. One summer Jay joined a swimming pool and went to the deepest part of the pool, but close to the lane ropes. He would sink under, hold the rope, swim away and then back to the rope. “What made it easier was when I brought a pair of goggles. I realised it wasn’t a fear of water, but more about not being able to see. If I could see, the fear was gone.”