Brett Stanley is an Australia-born, Los Angeles-based underwater photographer and cinematographer who discovered in Wellington that he loved photographing watery worlds. Working with everyone from professional mermaid performers to those with a fear of water, Stanley pushes the boundaries of the niche photography genre, bringing his imagination from behind-the-lens to life in front of it.
How did you find yourself in the realm of underwater photography?
It started about 10 years ago for me. This is when I was living in New Zealand, and I was a commercial photographer. I had a studio in Wellington and was doing a range of stuff, from advertising to fashion and everything in between. I was finding it a little difficult to break out into something a little more substantial and felt like I was doing a lot of what everyone else was doing.
I went back to Australia, where I’m from originally, and I found an old underwater camera I had from when I was 16 and went diving and I’d photograph fish. I was like, ‘oh, I wonder if I can use this to do what I do above water in the studio, but underwater’. I started playing with that camera, getting some ideas, making some equipment to make the lighting work.
The first shoot I did was with a model in a hotel’s swimming pool in Cuba St. It came out really well and that was when I thought this might actually be doable. My mind started to reel, like, what can I do with this?
I had been photographing a lot of my friends who were in the circus in Wellington and half of my studio that I had at the time was rented by a pole dancer. It made me think I could take aerial artists underwater and see what comes out. And what did come out was a series of images that went viral.
How do you go about arranging the sets?
I’m very much a one-man band, just because I have crazy ideas. I don’t have a lot of budget half the time and I don’t have an idea that is so concrete that I can explain it to someone else to have them make something. So, when I started doing the sets and the props underwater, it was experimental.
My first set that I built underwater was the album cover for Weyes Blood. For this, and most sets, I would build them above water and make them so that they could come apart and become flats. From there, I would have some assistance.
I’d be on scuba, and someone would pass me down the floor and I’d put that in the pool. Then they would pass me a wall and I’d join the walls together. One of the weirdest things I’ve ever done was put a fitted sheet on a bed underwater.
I love the use of - what I assume is - powder and also light to bring more vibrant colour into the photos. How do you plan this out?
I don’t sleep very well so, I spend a lot of my nighttime imagining things. With the shot of the three girls, those are actually clouds that I created out of cushion stuffing (see main image). These float in the water around them so they can pose with the clouds which gives the scene some texture.
The underwater garden was more of a collaborative concept. Here in Florida, we have an area called the Florida Springs, which are these freshwater springs that come up out of the ground. They’re beautiful and pristine, but they’re being affected by a lot of the agriculture that’s around and the runoff from people fertilising their front yards, which causes algal blooms. Basically, they’re at risk of dying. With Hannah, who’s the model in this, and Tessa Giles, an activist in that area who really knows a lot about how the springs work, we came up with this idea of using this non-toxic green tracing dye that disperses when they do water samples, so they can detect what sort of path the water has taken.
But also, when you spray it under the water, it looks like a big explosion of bright green powder. We rigged it up so that her watering can would spray it out, and it was a bit of a play on her being a housewife fertilising her front yard, but not realising that she was actually destroying the environment around her.
My whole thing is, if I’m making the effort to shoot underwater, I don’t want to use Photoshop. I’ve had enough trouble with people not believing that my shots are real anyway.
I assume these three photos were from your favourite shoot days as well. What do you remember most from them?
These three are a good cross-section to the sort of work that I do. The Weyes Blood cover was crazy because they came to me with this idea and had a production designer who was going to build the set for them. But he hadn’t done it before and just didn’t have the experience, so I put my hand up to build it. The shoot was just the artist, her manager, and two assistants. We spent five days building this set, but what we didn’t realise is that once we put the furniture in the water, we really only had about two hours before it was all going to disintegrate. Hence, the shoot itself was really fast, even though we’d spent five days setting it up. Having all that lead up to it, and then such a short shoot - the adrenaline was quite intense, but we had that feeling of coming away with having successfully done what we tried to do.
How do you prepare people who haven’t had a photo in this environment before to feel as comfortable as they appear in the photos?
I work with a whole range of people in my portrait studio here in Los Angeles. I’m working with people who have done this before, like professional mermaid performers, right through to people who don’t even swim - or even have a fear of water - but they love the photos and want to go through the process and the fear of it, and to be able to come away with this amazing memory of that experience. A lot of what I do is actually a little bit psychological.
Before a shoot, I’ll spend 20 minutes with the client, teaching them how to hold their breath properly, how to breathe out properly, how to relax in the water, and how to make the most of it. A lot of times, people will come to me, and they think they’re great in the water. But when they start to pose, they look terrible because they’re used to swimming rather than actually posing and looking good. I have to break them down a little bit and break their bad habits, so that they can start to relax. The trick for me is to tell them that I want them to almost fall asleep under the water. That’s how relaxed they should be. It’s that moment before you fall asleep, where everything feels good. That’s the emotional state you want to be in when you’re under the water.
When they see the photos, what does their reaction tend to be like?
Usually surprise because when they are posing they feel uncomfortable, awkward, and not particularly confident. But the camera doesn’t care what came before or after that, that single slice of time or that nanosecond where they looked great. That’s my job to capture that and when I show them on the back of the camera, that’s when they see it all come together. I think it’s a massive confidence boost for them.
I guess being underwater there’s quite a disconnect between how they feel they’re looking and what they’re actually looking like in the camera - almost because it’s like a performance.
Yeah, totally. On land if I had a client, I’d be saying things like, ‘hold that and maybe turn your wrist a little bit. Eyes up, chin up’. Guiding them through it in a moment really helps massage that image into something nice. But underwater, we can’t communicate. I really have to preload them with a whole bunch of techniques, tricks and processes of how to get into a pose and make it look good and then get out of it. Then it’s basically crossing our fingers and going down and I quite like the chaos of that because it is different every time.
On reflection, collaboration is a huge part of what I do. These three images are all collaborations with talented people coming together with an idea and trying to make it work. That amazing feeling of us swimming back to the edge afterwards and realising that we either got what we came for, or we did something totally different, but it was better anyway.
Do you ever have a shoot not go the way that you thought it would? And then you don’t necessarily have something that you want to take out of it?
Underwater it is a little bit hard to control and hard to make something exactly. I have clients who come to me, and they’ll show me a photo of someone else underwater as inspiration. But there’s so many things against us – the fact that they aren’t that person and may not have the same ability. A lot of what I do in terms of getting people ready for a shoot is actually managing their expectations as well as making sure they know the photo is going to be made unique to them and that they need to be open to the process and see what comes out the other end. Like the photo of the three girls with the clouds, I was shooting from a whole different direction for most of the shoot and was kind of happy with the photos.
But then I tried it from 90 degrees the other way and everything fell into place. The lighting was so much better. The cloud looks so much better. Those little things of ad-libbing saved my ass a lot.
