I Think I Can Walk on Water — Yesterday I Did - Words spoken by my six-year-old son.

“Dad, can you play with me?”

I return to the swimming pool of my childhood with my sons.

My mother always says that, as a child, I spent more time underwater than above it. I wasn't interested in swimming. I wanted to know how long I could hold my breath, how deep I could dive. Truth be told, even from a young age, being underwater felt like being somewhere else. The noise of the world was cancelled out.

Now my sons play in the same water.

The pool becomes an ocean. Australia is one mile away. We are sharks, squids, pirates, treasure hunters. We invent worlds beneath the surface.

But I am still Dad.

Small hands wrap around my neck. Feet land on my head. I am climbed on, pulled under, chased and instructed. My sons make the rules. I follow them. For a while, they direct the game and I become the character they've chosen.

The photographs are also self-portraits. I hold my breath and follow my sons with the camera, placing myself within the games we create. I experiment with what happens when the world is seen through water. Light moves differently beneath the surface.

The grainy black-and-white images move between the absurd and the dreamlike. Hands become sharks. Feet become tentacles. A father becomes a pirate, or simply something to climb on.

It is a place where the line between parent and child, reality and imagination, begins to loosen.

This isn't about escaping parenthood. I don't become a child again underwater. I am still a father. I still have responsibilities. I still have to get out of the pool eventually.

But play offers another way of being a parent. It allows me to surrender control, to follow instead of lead, and to enter a world where my children's imagination sets the rules.

I hold my breath and disappear beneath the surface.

For a while, the world above can wait.