Last year I began to publish photographs of swimmers on Instagram. As the collection grew, I began to notice a pattern. A great many of the people I was shooting seemed to be there not just for exercise or because they loved the water, but because it was helping them cope with or push through something. Some were dealing with pain – fibromyalgia, autoimmune diseases, back pain. Others were battling depression or anxiety. Still others were finding that simply being in the water was helping them deal with some grief or other personal loss.
It was about this time that I first met Vicky Allan, and what began simply as a photographic study of our fellow sea swimmers in Edinburgh turned over the course of a year into a passion project that saw us travelling across Scotland to meet others who swam in wild waters. The stories they told often echoed each other. There were those who swore by wild swimming as pain relief. Others spoke of the way it stilled their anxious minds. Some described it as a kind of mindfulness. The resulting book, Taking the Plunge, is an exploration of the healing power of wild swimming for mind, body and soul.
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