The Visual Language of Underwater Photography
Look at this image of a sea slug, a tiny mollusk, barely large enough to cover a human fingernail. I took the shot in the Philippines, obviously underwater, and not in an aquarium, but in the natural habitat of the mollusk. It’s a stunningly pretty tiny creature (the slug is only about a centimeter long), and it was a significant challenge to find the animal and to take a shot of this quality of it. Still, the image will not turn heads at any art photography exhibition in New York, Paris or Vienna – and it’s not meant to. The audience of this photograph are not the graduates of academic art schools, or the curators of photography exhibits in the fancier parts of the metropolises of North America or Euroland.
There is a vibrant photographic community, which has little overlap with the high-brow photography art world, practicing underwater photography: Its practitioners come from the ranks of the scuba divers, field biologists and nature photographers. The community has developed their own ideas what constitutes a good photograph: it greatly values finding rare “critters” such as sea slugs or rare species of seahorses, octopi or scorpionfishes. Should I announce on social media that I had spotted a blue-ring octopus or a Rhinopias scorpionfish (while showing the image of the critter in the post), congratulatory comments will pour in. An equally artistic (or aesthetically un-inspiring) shot of a more common cephalopod or scorpionfish will not raise any eyebrows. Dive guides – Philippine or Indonesian fishermen’s sons – who are good at spotting the rare underwater wildlife are sought after, and many underwater photo aces make sure they get to dive with their favorite critter spotter.
Close up and ultra- macro photography is very popular underwater, and the nasty optical properties of sometimes murky seawater has given rise to necessary tricks. The wide angle close up shot is a way of making your viewers believe that you captured an image in gin-clear water with angelic background light, while in reality you had to almost poke your underwater camera dome-port into the coral which ended up filling your frame.
A special type of underwater shots which are impossible to achieve on land is the “over-under”, a shot with the water surface running through the middle of the frame. Hard to pull off technically!
There is heavy use of the “snoot”, to focus strobe lights, in underwater photography. I think it can have its place, but the use of the gadget is often over-done and cliché. Too many photo compost winners are variants of the colorful fish or slug, isolated by snoot in mid-image. A certain repetitiveness is probably underwater photography’s biggest weakness. There exist Gigabytes worth of the super-cliché silhouette of a marine turtle from below image on underwater photo web forums. The image certainly looks appealing at first, but after countless repetitions it has lost its charm to my eyes.
Interestingly, there is a distinct Japanese branch of the underwater photo visual language. Softer contrasts, more subtle lighting, and a melancholic looking damselfish, with colors matching those of the coral background, is the classic Japanese underwater art shot.
Underwater photography also has a productive overlap with zoology, in the study of biodiversity. Capturing images of rare and cryptic sea creatures is a good way to map their geographic ranges.
Any encounter with a wild animal, and be it “only” a fairly brainless slug likely incapable of feeling distress or panic like a human or a fish will have its own ethics challenges. The underwater photo community has its own rules of engagement: even manipulating the position of a sea slug by putting it from the base to the bottom of an algae-covered pebble is frowned upon. As with any set of ethics, there are conforming followers, rule-breakers, true believers, and loud moralizers.
It would benefit the underwater photo world to look more to the art photo world – which of course is by no means monolithic – and some underwater photographers do, after fine-tuning their technical skills to near-perfection and unsatisfied with repeating similar shots over and over again. Of course, the top underwater photographers have always pushed both the technical as well as the artistic envelope on their own. Still, I have come across a few serious, while not world-class practitioners of underwater photography who decided that their creative journey was at an end after taking sleek-looking portraits of the same thirty fish species for ten years. Others in their situation went to study photography in art school.
Equally, the fine art world of photography would have things to learn from the underwater photo folks. Photographs where the aesthetic impression is the main priority can be quite refreshing, despite their absence of a social message and a clever reference to art history. The sheer technical challenge of taking a well-exposed, well-composed image while breathing from a scuba regulator, at a depth of thirty meters, in a medium – seawater – which is not very conductive to producing clear images, alone is worth of respect.
I put together a few of my own shots which I think challenge the eye:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pacificklaus/albums/72177720308862013