2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year: Jasmine Skye’s Water Dancers Zoe Poulis and Pam Kurosawa
Jasmine Skye’s collaboration with two members of the national synchronised swimming team has secured a gold medal pay-off for the subaqueous photographer.
Photographer Jasmine Skye had this idea in her head for an image that showcased the grace of the female form: it would be an underwater shot, black and white, the composition spare and starkly beautiful. She wanted it to look effortless – and of course that sort of thing always involves a lot of hard work behind the scenes.
To execute her idea, Skye had to enlist a couple of members of Australia’s artistic (synchronised) swimming team, book the dive pool at HBF Stadium in Perth for an hour, and wrangle two black cloth backdrops, each 6m by 3m.
Sorting out the first two things was easy enough, but trying to get the two giant backdrops to stay in place underwater was a nightmare – the lead weights she used to secure them to the bottom kept sliding down the sloping bottom of the 4.3m-deep pool. In the end, she had only a 10-minute window to get the shot before the black cloth became an untameable mess.
But didn’t the young athletes Zoe Poulis and Pam Kurosawa rise to the occasion? Skye’s shot of them swimming circles around each other underwater, their reflections bouncing off the water’s surface (the image is presented on its side, rotated left through 90 degrees) has won the black and white category of the global 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition.
Skye, a 39-year-old mother of two from Fremantle, has been a registered pediatric nurse for the past two decades, but in recent years nursing has been on the backburner while she focuses on her photography. It started as a hobby shortly after she’d moved to Perth from Mullumbimby, NSW (“I didn’t know anyone, and really needed a hobby outside of being a mum,” she says) and has since grown into a second career.
Recently, she has carved out a rather unusual niche as an underwater portrait photographer. Many of her clients are pregnant women, or else women who’ve survived a major illness or other trauma; it’s empowering to see themselves rendered through the otherworldly prism of underwater portraiture, she says. “It really can shift their perspective of themselves. It’s a beautiful thing.” Her professional mantra is See Yourself as Art.
Until now, Skye has had to conduct underwater portrait sessions in the ocean, or in other people’s pools, and occasionally even in rivers. But that’s all about to change: she’s just had a pool built at home, positioned so that the deep end catches the sunset light, and lined with photogenic dark grey tiles. “Crucially, it’s heated too!” she says. “I call it my pool studio.”