Narelle Autio takes a deep, sharp breath and dives beneath a jetty, stretching out from Adelaide’s Grange beach.
It’s darker down there, a deep blue colour. Surrounded by fish, the acclaimed photographer holds her glass and aluminium-encased camera at the ready.
It was iconic 20th-century photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson who first described the need to watch and wait for the “decisive moment”.
He was talking about doing this on the streets of Paris, rather than underneath a South Australian jetty. But this is precisely what the wetsuit-clad Autio is waiting for.
She’s been photographing underwater for 27 years now, and knows visual alchemy could happen at any moment.
In her latest series, she’s captured the shapes of jetty jumpers — those brave souls who hurtle themselves off piers with reckless abandon.
“I love that moment of immersion where someone jumps in and they bring that air into the water. It’s a really visceral feeling of immersion; going into another place and another world,” Autio says.
Like most photography, her work is “all about the light”.
She explains how effervescence, the fizzing of bubbles, creates a contrast of bright light against the dark blue background.
“They bring down all these bubbles that have the effect of exaggerating the light. It’s like a portal of light comes with them, a photocopy flash sort of thing.
“Sometimes you can’t see the bodies, you can just see an arm poking out. I like that feeling that they are surrounded, and the idea that in that moment of bubble immersion they are changing — I’m imagining magic to happen.”
In preparation for her latest exhibition — The Eyes of Her, on display as part of the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival — Autio spent hundreds of hours under jetties in and south of Adelaide.
She says the jetty jumpers were “like actors on the stage”.
“The jetty is packed and full of humanity. [Jetty jumpers] are just having fun, doing good things and just living — by circumstance and happenstance, you get something beautiful.”
Her main muse
Autio was born in Adelaide’s Henley Beach. The Australian coast has long been her main muse.
Except for some stints living in London and the USA, she’s always lived near it, and immersed herself in it — swimming, surfing and bodyboarding. And she’s photographed it from all angles.
Over a 35-year-career, first as a photojournalist then an artist, Autio has gained international acclaim for her energetic, colour-saturated imagery.
Taken on beaches, under waves and in oceanic depths, her work examines Australians’ relationship with the ocean and natural environment — including her own.
“Throughout my career, the water has featured as a muse and illustrates the different connections I have with the ocean and how it may have mirrored my own psychology at a particular time,” she says.
“[I’m interested in] how beautiful [the water and ocean] can be, but also the beauty and danger coming together in a transformative space.”
The Coastal Dwellers was an early, visceral series capturing the drama and force of this natural environment.
The images won Autio the prestigious international Leica Oskar Barnack award in 2002, a first for an Australian artist.
When she met her long-time partner Trent Parke, a distinguished photographer himself, Narelle drew him from shooting on the streets into the waves.
Together they created the now-iconic body of work The Seventh Wave (1999), capturing turbulent, high-contrast images on black and white film.
“[It was] an exploration of photography, it was a love affair of water and ocean; it was our love affair as well,” Autio says.
Then when she had young children and couldn’t spend the same long hours in the ocean, she found inspiration in their beachcombing.
Her internationally exhibited 2009 work The Summer of Us depicted objects like lone, washed-up thongs (both types), broken credit cards and sand-crusted fish skeletons.
“Photography is isolating, so I tend to try and find bodies of work that are actually an extension of how I’m living, so whether it’s walking on the beach or in the ocean or swimming — it’s a way of exploring what that means to me and why I’m attracted to it,” she says.
A new approach
When Autio dove into the water this summer, she knew the imagery would be different.
All her previous underwater photos had been taken on a Nikonos, a small 35mm film camera that even she admits “looks like a toy”. It only allowed 36 shots per roll of film.
At the end of every roll she needed to get out of the water, dry off the camera, and replace the film.
“Often my film is [kept] at the end of the jetty in a car, so I have to go back and do all that, then walk back to my spot and jump in again,” she says.
“So while I love film and I’ll always shoot film, it can disrupt the flow of what’s happening.”
But this year she was wielding a very different, much larger, digital camera set-up. The digital camera was protected underwater by casing, developed by a fellow photographer in collaboration with an engineer.
Suddenly Autio could spend five hours at a time taking hundreds of images of the ocean, right up until the battery died.
It also allowed her to capture several stages of the effervescence and movement, as opposed to the one film camera click.
With this new way of shooting, Autio noticed something interesting — it wasn’t just the dramatic moment of plunging down that captured her, but also the way figures moved back towards the surface, particularly the women.
Autio writes in the exhibition text that the imagery of these women “emerging from explosive bubbles, face thrust towards the light”, made her think of “ancient figureheads of a ship thrusting themselves through the ocean”.
“It is [a woman’s] physicality and their movement through the water, filled with energy and power, that I am embracing. They resemble the powerful symbol of ancient ship figureheads, entrusted to guide safe passage.”
This contrasts to ocean folk-tales that mostly depict women as sirens and sea goddesses who spell danger, luring sailors to their deaths with songs.
But instead of them being depicted as frightening creatures of folklore, Autio wanted to celebrate the strength and beauty of women in the ocean.
“Captured from life and turned into a fairytale, they are a reminder of the girl I once was, before years of life … throwing myself off the ends of jetties. I feel the power, and thrill and rush of flying through space,” she wrote.
“Then for a moment I am immersed in the undersea surviving on a breath of air, cocooned in light filled awe and effervescence, water and the possibility of magic.”
Autio hopes audiences get a sense of the awe and respect she’s felt for the ocean in her lifetime.
“I hope it inspires them to care about the ocean as well,” she says.
“It’s a space we use as humans so much but we are destroying it. We [need to] start thinking about how beautiful this space is and how much it gives back — we are the blue planet for a reason.”
Narelle Autio: The Eyes of Her is at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide until September 7.
