Today (I wrote this text on the 13th of January, 2025), I will explain how swimming helped me discover street photography.
I was swimming regularly between 2011 and 2018. In 2011, I started swimming for 30 minutes in a swimming pool. In 2017 and 2018, I was swimming for one hour and forty minutes (with only short breaks for peeing). How frequently did I swim? Throughout all these seven years, I have been swimming regularly for three to seven days weekly. As far as I remember, my record streak was swimming for over thirty days in a row. I was a swimming madman. Why do I write about all these things? How is it possible that swimming helped me discover street photography? After all, I started walking and taking pictures on Warsaw’s streets in October 2015. Thus, over two years, I switched my free time between swimming and street photography.
Today, from an almost ten-year perspective, I have no doubt that swimming emerged in my mind, heart, and soul desire to observe everything that is outdoors.
Let me explain this more clearly. Swimming (especially for one hour and forty minutes) can be considered a boring activity. One sees only the swimming pool’s tiles while doing this activity. One has to switch off one’s mind so as not to get crazy from watching the same tiles over and over again for almost two hours. Undoubtedly, while swimming, I switched off my mind like I do while doing street photography.
Still, I remember that after returning from the swimming pool to home, everything around me, placed in mundane reality, was fascinating, visually, to me. I have no doubt that visually boring swimming triggered my mind to seek something unique and unusual in the most usual parts of our reality. The act of swimming, which was, in my case, an indoor activity, instilled in me a desire to observe and appreciate the beauty of the outdoors. That’s how swimming helped me discover street photography.
