All images by Marta Bevacqua. Used with Creative Commons Permission.
With her dreamy take on underwater photography and conceptual portraiture, Paris-based fashion photographer Marta Bevacqua explores how silence can be both ethereal and beautiful. For her captivating series aptly entitled “Silence”, Marta goes beyond showing her muses gracefully floating in an underwater world. Instead, she gets closer, creating what looks like an intimate glimpse into the secret world of sirens seemingly lost in a reverie they can’t speak about.
“Silence”, in fact, can be seen as a clever nod to how one is rendered speechless when submerged in water, with air bubbles, underwater plants, a drifting jellyfish, and the way her models’ hair frame their faces being the only clues to Marta’s chosen setting.
While it’s easy to speculate the inspiration behind this series, if we go back to an interview with her, it could be just about anything. Like, maybe, the way someone looks behind a glass window, unable to convey messages through spoken words. Marta’s work is very whimsical and magical at the same time. She has gained a following for her hypnotic portraits showing her moody, delicate way of capturing feminine beauty, and it’s evident in this body of work despite the minimalism in details. It’s one of those conceptual works where a statement is no longer necessary, and instead, there’s this compelling atmosphere that seems to say wordlessly, “Don’t ask, because I won’t tell.”
While underwater photography is one of the more challenging genres to set up, “Silence” is a testament to the wisdom that “less is more”. The entire set is ingeniously so simple that all Marta needed to do was gracefully execute a fresh idea we rarely see explored in this realm of photography. Of course, some creative freedom and play also helps!
Visit Marta Bevacqua’s Behance page to see the rest of “Silence” and her other beautiful work.
