The swimmer stands calmly on the bottom of the pool, dressed in Speedos. Behind the goggles, his face is as impassive as a Greek sculpture, his torso cast in heavy shadows that fail to obscure the rippling might of the shoulders and arms that taper into clenched fists. Black tile lines and lane dividers appear to shoot out of his body like laser beams, the composition forging an optical effect that makes the lanes stretch on forever.
On a recent Saturday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, it’s notable how people linger over this picture, drawn in by its heightened sense of reality. The subject looks like a superhero or sea god exuding vast strength and mythical power. A couple of weeks later, I’m sitting with Michael Klim himself, upstairs at his parents’ modern home in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton.
Hunched over my phone, we’re studying that picture, taken by the British fine art photographers Anderson & Low. Klim remembers the shoot well. How the picture was taken during a Speedo campaign at the Australian Institute of Sport; the way the photographers snapped it through an underwater window in a pool designed for coaches to monitor their charges.
“It’s definitely one of my favourite photos,” says Klim, leaning back in his armchair next to a sideboard covered with old swimming trophies. “It was 1999, I was kind of in my prime, and everything was geared towards Sydney.” “Sydney”, of course, refers to the 2000 Olympics, where.