Australian Life: Neil Bailey’s intriguing entry

You may look at this image from the Australian Life exhibition and wonder what on Earth is going on. Can you figure it out?

Towel Fight: Neil Bailey’s image from the Australian Life exhibition

You might be looking at this image, a ­finalist in the Australian Life competition now on display in Sydney’s Customs House Square, and wondering what on Earth is going on. Perhaps your mind is taking in the available information – the matching get-up, the playful high-jinks – and conjuring up a probable story, a narrative, to make sense of it. Because that’s what minds do, right?

Neil Bailey makes a living as a photographer in the advertising industry, so mind-tickling images are his stock in trade. He’s worked on campaigns for Absolut vodka, Heinz, Cadbury’s, Qantas, ANZ bank and Australia Post, among others, and has a Cannes Gold Lion – the equivalent of an Oscar in the advertising world – on the mantelpiece at home in Sydney’s inner west. Outside of this, the 53-year-old has various quirky personal projects on the go, shooting series on subjects as diverse as beekeepers, the sport of fencing, roller derby, Tibetans, jockeys and mullets (“I was the official photographer for ­Mulletfest for a few years,” he laughs).

This image, shot under Sydney’s Iron Cove Bridge, is from another project named Photofictions. Each image in the series presents a scene that is ­intended to set the viewer’s mind ­whirring with possible interpretations. But here’s the spoiler alert: they are all staged, fictitious. In this shot, Bailey’s sons Leon and Jude and their mates were provided with matching swim gear and asked to act out various scenarios, including a towel fight. “I’ve known all these boys for years,” he says. “I was interested in capturing how they interacted with each other in the moment.” The idea is that it’s an urban swimming club letting off steam at the end of a session, he says. Is that how your mind interpreted it, too?