The Seventh Wave

When Trent Parke and Narelle Autio began photographing Australian beaches in the summer of 1999, they weren’t just documenting a landscape - they were slipping beneath its surface, searching for something elemental. What emerged was The Seventh Wave, a now-iconic collaboration that redefined how the Australian coastline could be seen: not as a postcard cliché, but as a place where beauty, danger, ritual, and myth collide.

That summer was one of the country’s worst seasons for drownings, a dark backdrop that sharpened both photographers’ sense of the ocean’s dual nature. Autio has described water as “the ultimate universal energy - something that both gives and takes away life.” Their images embrace that tension. Shot in luminous black and white, often from below the waterline, the photographs depict swimmers suspended in shafts of light, bodies tumbling weightlessly, waves collapsing into liquid chaos. Human forms appear transient, fragile, almost ghostlike. The sea is not a setting but a force - enveloping, humbling, and endlessly alive.

Yet The Seventh Wave is also a deeply personal project. Parke and Autio had just met - “our eyes met over a light-box at the newspaper,” Parke later said - and the collaboration marked the beginning of both a creative and romantic partnership. Parke’s earlier street-driven project dissolved the moment their artistic worlds collided; he felt the reasons for photographing had “completely changed.” Together, they turned their attention away from the grit of cities and toward the dreamlike, immersive space of water. In their hands, the ocean became a metaphor for transformation, intimacy, and shared vision.

Traveling the coastline, they photographed beaches from Sydney’s Bondi and Manly to quieter coves near Newcastle, Port Macquarie, and Byron Bay. But geography matters less than sensation. Opening the book feels like plunging into the shallows - the light refracts, bodies stretch and distort, time slows. Reviewers have described the images as mythic, surreal, candid and otherworldly all at once. They evoke childhood summers, the thrill of diving under a breaking wave, the sudden panic of losing the ocean floor beneath your feet. They remind us how small we are, and how irresistibly we return to the sea despite its risks.

Published in 2000, The Seventh Wave quickly became a landmark of contemporary Australian photography. Its influence endures because it captures something fundamental: the way the ocean shapes not only our coastline but our imagination. Parke and Autio’s images show that within the familiar rituals of beach life lies a deeper, almost primordial connection - a relationship to water that is joyous, fearful, and profoundly human.

More than two decades later, the book remains a testament to collaboration, to love, and to the wild, hypnotic pulse of the sea.