For Aldara Ortega, water is more than a setting - it is a place of transformation. What began as a refuge from the noise and intensity of New York became the foundation of an artistic practice spanning more than fifteen years. Beneath the surface, Aldara discovered a sense of weightlessness, freedom, and presence that she continues to capture in every image.
Drawing on her background in fashion design, painting, analog photography, and years spent in front of the camera, Aldara brings a uniquely layered perspective to her work. Her underwater photographs balance intention with surrender, combining carefully considered concepts with the unpredictable movement of water, light, fabric, and the human body.
In this conversation, Aldara takes us behind the scenes of her creative process - from the meaning of her signature surface reflections to the trust she builds with her muses, and the role of water as both collaborator and muse.
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What did you find underwater that you couldn't find on land?
I found myself again. While I was building my career in New York, I lost access to my painting studio. The city felt relentless, with noise everywhere and so little space to create, so I began swimming in an indoor pool. It became my refuge.
Beneath the surface, a different world opened up: muted sound, and a light that moved through reflections and refractions, transforming everything it touched. With it came a feeling I had never known on land: absolute presence, weightlessness, and freedom, while being completely held at the same time.
Above water, I was the one holding everything together. Underwater, the water held me. I wanted to keep that feeling, bring it into every part of my life, and share it with others. That is how my photography was born. I often say being underwater saved me, and I mean it. Every image I create is an invitation into that same presence, stillness, and freedom.
What does “painting with light” look like, from entering the water to the finished image?
Painting with light begins before the camera ever touches the water. Each image starts with a concept and a feeling I want to create. I arrive at every shoot with that intention, an open mind, and a muse I feel deeply connected to. In the water, I freedive alongside her, and we hold our breath at the same time.
Underwater, color fades and transforms, so the second half of the work happens in my studio. I treat each photograph the way a painter treats a canvas. I work section by section, touching each color individually, deepening shadow and bringing light forward from within the image, until the emotion I felt in the water lives inside the frame. This is where play, intuition, and my personal vision come in. I guess that is what you would call my style.
It began years ago as mixed media, painting directly over my underwater prints, and it evolved into a digital practice with the same painterly intention. When people tell me my work looks like a painting, I smile, because that is exactly what I am creating.
How did your background in fashion design and painting shape your visual language?
Fashion design taught me to see the body as an art form, and fabric as an extension of the body and its expression. I learned to see volume, texture, and fabric in motion: how it falls, how it wraps, how a silhouette tells a story. My training at Superior Center in Madrid also taught me to think conceptually, to research, gather information, and give form to inspiration, turning an idea in my imagination into something real. Every series I create still begins that way.
I also spent two years studying analog photography, and the darkroom became my first laboratory of light. Watching an image slowly emerge on paper taught me patience and precision, and showed me how light shapes emotion.
Painting taught me to see light and color as something you can build and transform. In New York I rented a small room in a SoHo loft from a painter who had studied alongside Chuck Close, and I cared for his studio in exchange for lessons. There I learned to work layer by layer, first in my mixed media pieces and today in every photograph.
More than twenty years in the fashion industry and in front of the camera as a model taught me how it feels to be seen, and how emotion lives in a gesture. My visual language lives where all of this meets: a designer’s eye for form, a painter’s hand for light, a model’s understanding of the body, and the way water makes me feel.
How much do you direct, and how much do you let the water decide?
My process is rooted in surprise and surrender. I direct the concept, and I let the water shape the moment. Before we go in, everything is intentional: the story, the palette, the fabric, the location, and the feeling I want the image to hold. Having spent years in front of the camera, I guide each muse with deep empathy, because I know that experience from her side.
Once we are beneath the surface, I surrender. Light, movement, and breath carry their own will, and I welcome it. The muse and I hold our breath together, and in those seconds we are completely connected. I feel what she feels, and that exchange lives inside the frame. The most alive images come from moments beyond planning: fabric unfolding in ways I could never design, a ray of light arriving at the perfect second, a muse fully immersed in her emotion. Nature becomes my collaborator: the sunlight, the rhythm of the water, the currents, the clarity of the day, the tiny 3 particles and sand drifting through the frame. All of these elements live beyond my control, and they are exactly what gives each image its own unique spirit. My freediving training gives me calm and time down there to stay present and receive what the water offers.
I often photograph women together or in groups, and nudity in my work is the courageous removal of armor. To be seen in your fullness, free of the costume the world asks you to wear, is the most whole human act I know. These images are about recognition: one woman saying to another, I see you. All of you. And you are enough. The female body is an art form, and it is a blessing to inhabit it and express through it. So the most important direction I give is trust. I create a space of safety, prepare deeply, and then trust completely.
What does the surface reflection mean to you, and when did you realize it had become so important?
My colors and the surface reflection are my signature. The reflection becomes a mirror between two worlds. Beneath it, the body is weightless and held. Above it is the world we live in every day. In the reflection, the two meet, and everything doubles and transforms. For me, it speaks about the self and its echo: who we are when we let go, and who we become in that surrender. It holds the questions at the heart of all my work: How does water transform us? What happens when we surrender to it?
For years, it was simply part of what drew me in. Then, looking back across my series, I saw it in almost every image, and I understood it had become my language. I love how the colors in the reflection move like a dance toward abstraction, so the image becomes both real and dreamlike at once. Rather than documenting the underwater world, I am creating a portal into an emotional state.
Aldara Ortega’s work invites us to look beyond the image and into the feeling it holds. Her photographs are not simply records of an underwater world, but expressions of surrender, connection, freedom, and self-discovery.
Through her practice of “painting with light,” she transforms fleeting underwater moments into something enduring - where reflection becomes a mirror between two worlds, and the boundary between photography and painting begins to disappear.
At the heart of her work is a simple invitation: to let go, to be fully present, and to discover what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be held.
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