The Photographer’s Eye Gallery will present "Inner Space," an exhibit of underwater images by Steve Eilenberg and Marie Tartar, who have been photographing the ocean’s creatures, great and small, for nearly 30 years. The exhibit opens on Oct. 26 and will run through Nov. 30. "Inner Space" will feature images made during their black water dives, in which they photograph minute, translucent creatures that rise at night from the ocean’s depths to its surface to feed. The Photographer’s Eye Gallery will host a reception for the artists from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Oct. 26, and artists Eilenberg and Tartar will conduct walk-throughs of their exhibit on Nov. 9 and Nov. 30 at 3 p.m. The nonprofit Photographer’s Eye Gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and by appointment by calling 760-522-2170. Free parking is available in front of and behind the gallery. Eilenberg and Tartar are San Diego-based radiologists and a married couple who collaborate as Aperture Photo Arts. Their work has been displayed in several venues, including the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, the San Diego Natural History Museum and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The couple began diving in 1989 and undertook underwater photography about six years later. Their photography ranges from shooting the planet’s largest creatures, sperm whales, to some of the smallest, like the wunderpus, a color-shifting octopus that emerges at dusk to hunt. “In black water, these are small, translucent larval forms of life that come up from the deep at night,” Tartar said. Shooting at night in the deep presents a set of unique challenges, the first of which is diving proficiency. “The better diver you are the better photographer you’ll be,” Tartar said. “You’re on a life-support system, (and) you have to have excellent buoyancy,” because if you drift to the ocean floor you may stir up a cloud of sand and foul your studio. Diving in black water presents the obvious challenge of how see your subject. To shoot at night the couple position themselves along a line dropped into the sea from a buoy; the line has flashlights attached. They also use their own lighting array, so that when something interesting comes into view they can follow and photograph it. Such a creature is a tube anemone larva, which lives in waters off the Philippines and rises from great depths, as much as 1,000 meters. Nutrients in the water stick to the larva’s “fingers,” which the organism licks. “As it slowly tumbles in the water column, I wait for a good body position and shoot,” Eilenberg said. “Intense strobe light defines them and accentuates features and organelles that otherwise would go unnoticed.” Not all their quarry is so small. Tartar recently visited Argentina to photograph Southern right whales, an endangered species that was hunted extensively until the 1960s. “Whales are simply too big to light with strobes or a flash,” Tartar said. Much of that photography is done at or just below surface level. The reward, they said, is in sharing images of creatures that few of us get to see. “In the end it’s about showing people a hidden world,” Tartar said. “A world that we value greatly and everyone should value, that our planet pretty much depends on. You can’t really appreciate or conserve something you don’t understand. You can’t value it if it’s an abstraction to you. It’s kind of a miracle what’s in there and we only know a fraction of it.” Eilenberg said he hopes their photographs help people realize how important it is to respect and protect the ocean. And he hopes that viewers are amazed by what they see. “I’d love for some people to just have their mouth drop open and say, ‘I can’t believe this even exists on this planet. This is not a real creature, is it?’” Eilenberg said. The Photographer’s Eye Collective on Facebook / Instagram
