Narelle Autio’s jetty jumpers from the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize

She has photographed Adelaide’s jetty jumpers - from beneath the water’s surface - every summer for years. Why is it such a fascinating subject for Narelle Autio?

Parthenope (The Siren) by Narelle Autio

On hot summer days the jetty ­jumpers of Adelaide have a right old time, leaping with athletic grace (or not) into the ocean to ­escape the baking heat. They jump in with their eyes closed – but Narelle Autio has her eyes wide open, ready for The Moment. She’ll take a breath and slip under the surface with her ­camera in an underwater housing. “It’s dark and cool and quiet down there,” she says. “And then suddenly there’ll be an explosion of light and energy.” As the jumper’s body slows to a halt, for a split second it’ll be cocooned in ­bubbles, a luminous effervescence. And that’s The Moment. It holds such a fascination for Autio, she has spent years capturing it.

The 55-year-old was a photojournalist early in her career, pivoting from her first job at the Adelaide Advertiser to assignments in Europe and the US. She won a couple of World Press Photo awards, and became the first Aussie to scoop the international Leica Oskar Barnack Award. But the pull of home beckoned. “After five years overseas I really wanted to discover my own country,” she explains. “I wanted to dig deep into Australia and our psyche.” She and her partner, fellow photographer Trent Parke, spent two years travelling around Australia, working on artistic and documentary projects, before another sort of adventure – raising two sons – took over. Their boys are now 20 and 18.

The ocean, and our relationship to it, is an abiding theme in Autio’s work. She doesn’t know the jumper in this image, a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. (She named it Parthenope after the siren in Greek mythology – a reference to feminine beauty and strength, and also the mistrust it engenders in men.) In 20 years of photographing jetty jumpers from this unusual perspective, Autio has never tired of the wonder of it. “It’s a moment of transformation,” she says. “Their bodies go into all these amazing shapes, shrouded by bubbles. It happens too quickly for the naked eye to take it all in. Only a photograph can reveal the intricate beauty in it.”