27 Otherworldly Photos By Tamara Dean That Were Created In A Real Underwater Studio

Dean’s connection to the natural world is especially apparent in “In Our Nature,” a site-responsive series staged in the Adelaide and Mount Lofty botanic gardens for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Inspired by her first encounter with the Sacred Lotus in full bloom, she spent more than a year revisiting the gardens as they changed with the seasons. Her subjects ranged in age from 2 to 80 and included dancers from the Australian Dance Theatre, allowing Dean to connect different stages of human life with the growth, flowering, collapse, and renewal of the surrounding plants. By positioning the body within these larger natural cycles, she reminds viewers that humanity does not exist apart from nature but forms part of the same vulnerable and interconnected ecosystem.

The artist took on an unusually personal role in “High Jinks in the Hydrangeas,” created during the isolation and anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working in private gardens, Dean became the photographer, director, and central figure in the images. She placed herself among thick foliage and flowering shrubs, climbing, contorting, hiding, and moving through the landscape in ways she had previously asked of her models. The process challenged her physically and emotionally, but it also changed the way she viewed her own body. Rather than focusing on perceived imperfections, she found herself recognizing courage, agility, humor, strength, curiosity, and vulnerability in the woman moving through the photographs.

Water later became both a practical setting and a powerful metaphor within Dean’s work. “In Palace of Dreams,” figures and familiar objects appear caught between falling and flying as the world turns upside down around them. The series reflects the strange tension of continuing ordinary life while facing increasingly visible environmental disasters, rising water levels, and widespread climate anxiety. The Suspended Moment develops these concerns through compositions inspired by 17th-century Dutch Vanitas paintings. Traditional still-life arrangements are submerged, while fruit, flowers, fabrics, and domestic objects escape gravity and seem to dance through flooded spaces. The beauty of the scenes draws viewers closer, but beneath it lies a warning about instability, transience, and the consequences of a changing climate.

Creating these images involves far more than placing a subject underwater. Dean constructs intricate sets using backdrops, natural materials, flowers, fabrics, and carefully selected objects, then works with buoyancy, movement, reflection, and controlled light to transform them. Underwater, clothing expands, hair drifts, objects become animated, and familiar rules of balance and perspective disappear. In “The Flower Duet,” whose title refers to the celebrated duet from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé, performers move among camellias, roses, jasmine, and lush garden foliage in a celebration of feminine power, beauty, grace, and renewal. The resulting photographs blur the boundary between the organic and the constructed, producing scenes that may appear digitally imagined but are rooted in physical sets, natural elements, and Dean’s careful photographic process.