Bondi Splash

Local filmmaker Trevor Graham has turned his documentary eye on his own backyard with his latest work, a stunning photographic exhibition that captures the essence of what it means to take a dip at iconic Bondi Beach. Armed with a small, waterproof digital camera, Graham waded waist deep into the surf to capture delight and drama experienced by fellow swimmers in the water. “I wanted my photographic point of view to be inside the surf, alongside the other bathers,” he says. But the blinding light of a sizzling summer’s day often made it almost impossible to see his camera’s screen clearly, so his approach was often random. “I’d just point and shoot and kept shooting as I’d go under the water and come up from a wave along with everyone being pounded by the surf. I lost the camera several times. Luckily, I always found it, but it was this haphazard, chance process that appealed to me,” says Graham. “I also discovered the camera, with its fast shutter speed, could capture moments or a split-second image far beyond what the human eye could see.” Trevor Graham, an internationally acclaimed Bondi filmmaker, took thousands of photographs over three years between summer 2015 and autumn 2018, in between directing his most recent feature documentaries, Make Humus Not War and Monsieur Mayonnaise both of which have screened at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. “As a filmmaker I look for stories that will sustain an audience for an hour or 90 minutes. As a photographer, I want to tell a story in a single frame through action, the light, a facial expression or bodily feature.” Trevor Graham’s “Bondi Splash” exhibition captures swimmers as if frozen in time, surrounded by exploding droplets of water, their bodies submerged and contorted by the waves, their faces reflecting a transcendent state of being. Others reflect the glory of being at one with the ocean. “In summer, for me, a daily swim is a bathing ritual, a ‘holy dip’ that gives you that blissed out feeling of being in the sea, salt and surf. That’s what I wanted to capture with my photos,” he says.