Heart of the Nation: Tamara Dean’s Flower Duet series

Photographic artist Tamara Dean loves the ‘otherworldly’ effect of shooting underwater – and she has cleverly designed her underwater studio so she doesn’t even get wet …

Lilac, from The Flower Duet series by Tamara Dean

It looks dreamy and ethereal, and also kind of unreal, like it’s a painting. But this image from Tamara Dean’s new series The Flower Duet is a dinkum photo, ­created in a backyard pool using only a few props, a fair bit of effort and a whole lot of ­imagination. Isn’t it beautiful?

Dean, a former newspaper snapper, quit Sydney 10 years ago and moved with her family to a six-acre property at Cambewarra on the Shoalhaven River, where she pivoted into a life as a photographic artist. The Flower Duet ­series, now exhibiting at Michael Reid Galleries in Sydney, riffs on the interconnection of the human and natural worlds – a recurring theme in her work. It has female models posing within intricate “sets” that Dean created, on land and underwater, festooned with masses of flowers that she sourced from local florists. The images are inspired by the regenerative energy of spring, but set within a “fantasy space”, she says. “They’re a celebration of inner strength and beauty and colour.”

This one, titled Lilac, features lilac flowers entwined with foliage from a fig tree in her ­ garden – all of it clamped onto a scaffolding plank laid across the top of the pool. A moody sky photo she shot years ago, printed onto an 8m wide vinyl sheet, was hung in the water as a backdrop. The model, a high school friend of Dean’s teenage son, gamely followed her ­instructions to dive down to the bottom of the pool, expel some air then slowly float upwards. The image depicts the moment before she breaks the surface, which appears here “like a membrane, a portal to ­another world”, Dean says. “And she had to do all that while also looking serene, which isn’t easy at all underwater.”

The family pool, which doubles as Dean’s underwater studio, is set into a steep slope with the deep end above ground; a big, reinforced Perspex “window” is set into the end wall, below water level. A smart bit of design, right? “It means I can stand outside and work without even ­getting wet!” she says.