There's a stretch of Bondi where the Pacific doesn't lap — it arrives. Waves come over the Icebergs wall and swallow the lane markers whole, and the swimmers keep swimming. I've photographed that pool for ten years and it has never once given me the same picture twice.
I started calling the series The Ministry of the Sun because that's what it felt like at dawn — a congregation. People come down in the half-dark, small and a little defiant against all that water, and they get in. There's a devotion to it. The light does the rest: copper on the swell, silver on the bathers, the whole ocean throwing itself at concrete.
Small but defiant against the ocean — that's the whole series in five words.
The frames I keep are the ones where the sea is closest to winning — the wave crashing the wall, the defiant swimmer, the shot where the spray is so near you can almost taste the salt. I've never been interested in the postcard Bondi. I want the one that remembers something.
Ten years on, I still set an alarm for that pool.
— Jude