Narelle Autio

Narelle Autio, Agence Vu

Backstage at the ballet. Hand in hand, young ballerinas return to their dressing room after a performance. The dancers, aged between six to eight, practice every weekend for a much-anticipated end of year recital. Melbourne, Australia, October 2001.

Narelle Autio is an Australian photographer celebrated for her vibrant and evocative images of people, landscapes, and the sea. Born in Adelaide, she studied Visual Arts at the University of South Australia before beginning her career as a photojournalist in 1991. She worked internationally as principal photographer for News Limited in London, traveling extensively across Europe and the USA, before returning to Australia in 1998 as a senior photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Autio has won two World Press Photo Awards, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2002), the only Australian recipient to date, an American Picture of the Year Award, and two Walkley Awards. She has published two photographic books and collaborated with her partner, Trent Parke, on projects including The Seventh Wave (2000) and The Summation of Force (2018), which premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival and Sundance. Her work is exhibited and collected nationally and internationally.