“I Was Really Surprised by the Swimmers’ Powerful Energy”: Or, How Almost Breaking Your Back Makes You Notice That Humans Are Weirdly Impressive
There are two kinds of art-world origin stories.
The first kind goes like this: I was born with a camera in my hands. I always knew. I saw the light differently. At age six I framed my first decisive moment.
The second kind goes like this: I got violently reminded that my spine is not, in fact, indestructible.
Jorge Perez Ortiz belongs firmly to the second category, which already makes him more interesting.
Three years ago, Ortiz was on a small wooden boat traveling from Cartagena to nearby islands when the ocean decided to remind everyone onboard who actually runs the planet. A wave hit. His body lifted. His body came down. A vertebra fractured. The word “emergency” entered the chat. Surgery followed.
This is not the glamorous part of the artist biography. There are no gallery walls here, no flattering lighting, no carefully chosen captions. There is just a human body doing what it does best when surprised: failing abruptly.
And yet, this is the moment that eventually leads to The Swimmers—a photographic series about strength, discipline, and bodies that are very much not failing.
Which is how art so often works. Something breaks. Something else sharpens.
The Ocean: Freedom, Escape, and the Fine Print No One Reads
Ortiz says he has “always been captivated by the power of water and the sense of freedom and escape one feels when diving into it.”
This is the kind of sentence that sounds poetic until you realize it is also wildly optimistic.
Water is many things. It is soothing. It is reflective. It is cinematic. It is also deeply uninterested in your self-actualization journey.
The romantic version of water is all smooth horizons and controlled breathing. The real version includes undertows, surprise waves, and physics that do not care about your posture.
Ortiz admits that before his accident, he hadn’t considered “the other side of this freedom and the risks it carries.” Which is a very polite way of saying: I had not yet been introduced to consequences.
We are all like this, by the way. We adore metaphors about freedom until they physically rearrange us.
The ocean doesn’t offer disclaimers. It lets you project whatever meaning you want onto it—right up until it doesn’t.
Recovery Is Not a Montage (But We Pretend It Is)
After emergency surgery comes recovery, which is usually described in public narratives as a process of healing, reflection, and rediscovery.
What this often leaves out is the boredom, the fear, and the low-grade existential dread that sets in when your body stops behaving like an obedient coworker and starts acting like an unreliable contractor.
Back home in Barcelona, Ortiz’s accident became a pivot point. Not in a motivational-poster way, but in a quieter, more unsettling one. When your spine has recently demonstrated its willingness to betray you, you start paying closer attention to bodies that do not look fragile.
You start noticing posture. Muscle tension. Breath control. You notice people who put themselves in environments that demand repetition, discipline, and discomfort—and do it voluntarily.
Enter: swimmers.
Swimming as a Language the Body Speaks Without Apology
Swimming is an odd sport. It is solitary but communal. It is repetitive but technical. It is violent in effort and serene in appearance.
From the outside, it looks calm. From the inside, it is lungs on fire and muscles negotiating ceasefires.
For Ortiz, swimming was not just rehabilitation. It was recalibration. With the support of a coach, he entered a world where bodies are not symbolic abstractions—they are tools, limits, and proof.
Swimming doesn’t tolerate performative toughness. It rewards consistency. It exposes weakness quickly. You can’t bluff your way through water.
That makes swimmers excellent photographic subjects, if you’re interested in reality instead of theater.
The Swimmers: Not Hero Worship, Not Trauma Porn
It would be easy for a project like The Swimmers to slip into one of two traps.
Trap one: inspirational clichés. The kind where adversity magically turns into wisdom, and every scar glows with purpose.
Trap two: fetishized suffering. Bodies reduced to symbols of endurance for the viewer’s emotional consumption.
Ortiz manages to avoid both, largely because his approach is observational rather than declarative.
This isn’t a series that shouts LOOK AT STRENGTH. It quietly says this exists, whether you’re paying attention or not.
The swimmers are not posed as saviors or metaphors. They are simply there—present, confident, and unmistakably capable.
A Phone Camera, an Olympic Pool, and the Myth of Accidental Mastery
The image at the center of this story was shot on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is both deeply modern and slightly funny.
Ortiz primarily shot the series on medium-format film—slow, deliberate, expensive, demanding. The phone was there to “assist” with setup, a secondary tool.
And yet, the phone image is the one that becomes iconic.
This bothers people who need art to follow rules. It delights people who understand how reality works.
Phones are not cheating. They are extensions of attention. The difference isn’t the sensor—it’s the eye behind it.
The photograph was taken at a pool used during Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic Games. In the background, the city asserts itself: the cathedral, the Torre Glòries, architecture quietly witnessing human exertion.
The swimmers—members of the Sabadell and Mediterranean teams—were told where to stand, but not how to be.
This matters.
Confidence You Can’t Direct
Ortiz says he was surprised by “the confidence they showed in front of the camera and the powerful energy they transmitted.”
This is the kind of sentence that sounds simple until you unpack it.
Confidence is not the same as posing. Posing is about performance. Confidence is about indifference to being evaluated.
Swimmers are used to exposure in the least flattering sense. They train in minimal gear, under bright lights, with every flaw amplified by water and mirrors. They are timed, measured, corrected, and compared.
By the time a camera appears, it is just another observer.
That’s the energy Ortiz is responding to. Not bravado. Not swagger. Comfort in one’s own physical competence.
This is not something you can fake, and it is not something you can direct.
Bodies After Trauma Look Different to the Person Who Lived It
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said explicitly in the article but hums underneath every sentence:
When you’ve been injured badly enough, bodies stop being abstract.
They are no longer symbols of youth, beauty, or productivity. They are systems that can malfunction. They are alliances that require maintenance.
Seeing swimmers after a spinal injury is not neutral. It is charged.
Every shoulder rotation, every upright stance, every relaxed confidence in physical space carries weight. Not envy—respect.
Ortiz’s newfound appreciation for the human body isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about trust. Watching people trust their bodies after you’ve learned how easily that trust can be broken changes the lens entirely.
The Discipline No One Romanticizes Enough
We like to romanticize talent. We like to believe some people are simply built for excellence.
Swimming ruins that fantasy quickly.
The sport is boring in the most important way. Early mornings. Endless laps. Repetitive drills. Marginal gains that only matter because they compound.
This is not cinematic struggle. It is routine.
Ortiz calls the project “a tribute to hard work and unwavering dedication,” which is refreshingly unflashy language. No destiny. No calling. Just work.
The swimmers’ power comes from the absence of drama. They don’t need a narrative arc. They already have one—it just happens at 5 a.m. every day.
The City Watches, Unmoved
There’s something quietly perfect about the fact that Barcelona’s landmarks sit in the background of the image, indifferent.
Cities do not care about your recovery. They do not pause for your insight. They remain.
The swimmers train anyway.
This is the unspoken tension of the photograph: permanence versus effort. Stone versus flesh. Structures built to last versus bodies built to adapt.
Ortiz’s accident happened at sea, a place with no landmarks and no memory. This image happens in a city, surrounded by history, reminding us that bodies are temporary but capable of astonishing output while they last.
Art That Doesn’t Beg to Be Understood
What makes this image—and the series it comes from—work is restraint.
There is no insistence that you feel inspired. No demand that you project your own struggle onto it. No caption screaming about resilience.
It simply presents bodies that know what they can do.
And perhaps that’s what Ortiz learned most deeply from both his accident and his recovery: meaning doesn’t need decoration.
Sometimes it’s enough to look at people doing difficult things well and let that sit with you unprocessed.
Final Thought: Power Isn’t Loud
“I was really surprised by the swimmers’ powerful energy,” Ortiz says.
The surprise isn’t that the energy exists. It’s that it’s so quiet.
In a culture obsessed with visible transformation and dramatic redemption arcs, swimmers offer a different model: power as consistency, confidence as calm, strength as familiarity with discomfort.
Ortiz didn’t set out to document this. He arrived there sideways, via a fractured vertebra and a forced reckoning with fragility.
Which might be the most honest way art ever gets made.
Not from mastery, but from interruption.
Not from certainty, but from paying closer attention after something breaks.
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