Children swimming into the wild blue yonder

Take a look at Rocket, Alice Myers's award-winning series of photographs of children swimming. Then close your eyes: feel the steaming air before you jump, and the bracing bite of cold water Photograph: Alice Myers

The unspoken changing room nerves, the clothes gingerly peeled off, and the sweetness of childish triumphs celebrated with a Ribena and a Wagon Wheel Photograph: Alice Myers

How the racket of shrieks and splashes above water segue into a wondrous, silent, underwater universe, a place where knock-kneed, awkward, childish limbs learn their first grace Photograph: Alice Myers

The sensory overload of being a child in a swimming pool seems to lodge those long-ago half-hours in our memory banks. Myers's pictures freeze-frame the moment a child pushes off from the side of the pool. The child surges ahead with the force of independent will; you are left watching the ripples they leave behind Photograph: Alice Myers

Although you can't see the children's faces, you can see through their goggles: the blue remembered hills of childhood are there, in the blurred outline of the municipal tiles on the swimming pool floor Photograph: Alice Myers