DESIGN PROFILE: TAMARA DEAN

Meet the award-winning photographer who helps highlight global issues via her work

What’s the story behind your Endangered series and the shot that

won the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize? I was on Heron Island with the Climate Council to learn about the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. I went along not knowing much about what was going to happen, so I took my camera because I thought it could be an opportunity to try out photographing people underwater. We were snorkelling, and I asked my group if they would consider helping me try this idea out. It involved them getting undressed, but they were happy to do that. When I was able to show them the photos back on the island, people who hadn’t been there were saying that they wished they had been. When the bodies are in the water, there’s such a fluidity to them, and I think they were able to picture themselves in it. So on the last morning I proposed a shoot with a bigger group and had 16 people turn up. That trip was incredible because it armed me with this sense of understanding and of urgency about climate change, and being able to make work which spoke to that was really important for my practice.

How did you expand on that idea for the series? With a suite of images that were taken out at Jervis Bay, as an extension of those works from Heron Island. I wanted a tornado of women underwater, but that would involve scuba diving, which is a step further than I am actually able to do. So I paid for my husband to train as a scuba diver, and he was below the surface camera operating while I was on the boat directing the 21 women. I had to stagger the way they would enter the frame and have them dive in from different angles, timing it so they would end up in front of the camera at the right moment.

What are the challenges of photographing people underwater? Getting into the water. I’m scared of being in the ocean. At Heron I had a full-face snorkel and looked ridiculous; all these beautiful, graceful bodies and I was there balancing on my noodle [laughs].

What’s next for you? I’m planning to take the series onto land, still staying within that framework but using the body and the landscape in a different way. I recently did a video commission for 100 Mount Street in North Sydney with Urban Art Project. That was an incredible experience. With my photography I’ve always tried to create scenes that the viewer feels they can almost enter, so it’s a natural progression to be making installations and moving-image work where you get that sense of immersion.

Tamara Dean (right) hasn’t let her fear of water get in the way of making iconic underwater images. Most of her Endangered series — featuring Endangered 3 (below) and Endangered 14 (above left) — was shot near Heron Island and in Jervis Bay. Endangered 8 (above) was captured on land and features bodies in harmony with nature, as does another work, Elephant Ear in Autumn (bottom).