The photo series directed, art directed, styled and performed by Altın Tatlı tells the story of how, as a child, Altın have conquered their fears. As a 12-year-old, one night Altın saw two monsters (the spiky shadow and the black skeleton) in their half-awake state in their room. Terrified by this nightmare, Altın developed achluphobia (fear of darkness), somniphobia (fear of sleep), and monophobia (fear of loneliness). Discomforted by the fearful days, Altın seeks cures for their phobias in science and nature.
As a nerdy child, Altın loved observing nature and watching documentaries, so one day while watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Altın was enlightened by Carl Sagan’s demonstration about dimensions and the tesseract (aka hypercube, a cube in the fourth dimension). As a 12-year-old, they tell themselves, ‘What if what I saw was just the shadows of some creatures from other dimensions, and in reality, they are so beautiful and colorful and not so scary? Maybe they are so little, and I just got scared from their big projected shadows?’
But what does what Altın have seen really represent? As an adult, they revisit this incident from a psychoanalytical perspective. A reflection we see from the corner of our eyes—maybe a ghost haunting our home or a scary shadow that makes us run back home out of breath—are merely projections of our dark side, our supressed guilt, lurking from the depths of the oceans of our minds. 


“Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures soon loom up; fishes, presumably, harmless dwellers of the deep — harmless, if only the lake were not haunted. They are water-beings of a peculiar sort. Sometimes a mermaid or nixie gets ensnared in the fisherman’s net (Jung).”


We all make mistakes, and we all have dark sides to our existence, but we suppress our guilt as a survival mechanism. Because it takes a lot of courage to accept our flaws and face these monsters, ghosts, and shadows. It is scary to admit, but the path to becoming a better person starts with facing our shadows.