“I have always been drawn to beaches. Growing up in Istanbul in the 1980s, I was fortunate to swim in some of the most pristine waters of the world — the Marmara Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea — before mass tourism reached those shores. Summers were spent on the Princes’ Islands, where I would swim for hours alongside boats in the open water. I hadn’t yet met fear. There is something about surrendering to the open sea, facing its vastness as it stretches toward the unknown. In that moment, you stand before something divine — the seen and the unseen, everything that came before and everything still to come. The sand, the sea, the sky, the clouds… they dissolve into each other, and for a brief instant, you dissolve into them. You belong — as those who came before you once belonged — to the same eternal rhythm of nature.

When I walked onto Siesta Key Beach decades later, that same feeling returned. The white sands, the turquoise waters, the infinite sky above — they all seemed to hum with a quiet, ancient harmony. I reached for my camera, instinctively overexposing the scene until the white of the sand, the breaking waves, and the passing clouds melted into one. A soft, luminous veil wrapped around the people scattered across the beach, as if time itself had paused to hold them. In that light, they seemed momentary yet eternal — like echoes of everyone who has ever stood at the edge of the sea. These photographs are my attempt to capture that fleeting wholeness, that serene knowing that we are part of something far greater, and that it has always been so.”

-Bahar Kural

Awards: Gold Winner, 2022 Pollux Awards, Bronze Winner – 2022 Tokyo Foto Awards