A STUNNING fusion of portrait and underwater photography is one of the highlights of this year’s Show Off exhibition.
Held in Hamilton Hill and now in its 21st year, the exhibition is a celebration of the visual arts in Cockburn.
Coolbellup’s Jasmine Skye wowed the selection committee with her arty underwater shots.
A qualified paediatric nurse, Jasmine first got into photography after taking snaps of her infant son.
• Some of the amazing underwater photos by Coolbellup’s Jasmine Skye (below).
She fell in love with her hobby and quickly turned it into a business, offering maternity, newborn and family portrait photography.
But around 2016, she began to feel artistically stifled and burnt-out.
“I was searching for something to bring the spark back and I’d seen a photo taken underwater,” Skye says.
“My best friend was pregnant at the time and I asked if I could take some photos of her in the river near where we grew up.
“It was the most challenging photo shoot I had ever done. I knew immediately I had to explore it more because the process and the results were so dynamic and dramatic.
“It was like Christmas, I didn’t know what I was going to get from one shoot to the next.”
Honing her newfound craft, Skye went on to photograph 63 women at volunteer underwater modelling shoots for her first solo exhibition: “The backbone of portrait photography is to flatter the subject but I was able to take that pressure away and explore my own creative voice. That’s when I finally felt I could call myself an artist.”
For the physically demanding underwater shoots, Skye wears a weight belt, mask and flippers, and does a series of “one breath” shots of her subject.
“I use my professional camera with an Aquatech underwater housing. It’s a custom housing so I can have full access to manual settings, using natural available light,” she says.
“The images [for Show Off] are a little more polished editing-wise compared to every day client work, as they were for an exhibition, but mostly in camera capture with just distractions removed.
“The cotton rag fine art textured paper really helps bring out the vision.”
Aside from the two works by Skye, the exhibition will feature another 25 first-time exhibitors and a host of established names including Sharyn Egan, Larry Mitchell, Trevor Vickers, George Haynes and Greg Baker.
Show Off is at Memorial Hall, corner of Carrington Street and Rockingham Road, in Hamilton Hill from March 21-29. For more details see cockburn.wa.gov.au.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK