Every Picture Tells a Story
By Elizabeth Fasolino
(11/7/2007) In September 2002 Alex Kirkbride, an underwater photographer, set out on a journey that would span three years and 100,000 miles, leading him into cranberry bogs, wetlands, flooded quarries, underwater wrecks, and the occasional swimming pool.
Driving a 55-foot-long rig with an Airstream trailer weighing 17,000 pounds, Mr. Kirkbride crisscrossed the United States, researching and interviewing divers about the best local spots before heading underwater, camera in tow. The result is “American Waters,” a new book that mixes the anecdotal detail usually found in volumes of natural history in local libraries and historical society reading rooms with the visual wow of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”
The late explorer’s son, Jean-Michel Cousteau, wrote the book’s introduction. And though it is filled with eye-popping shots of creatures of the deep — a crocodile snake eel, a West Indian manatee, and the placenta from a humpback whale are just a few — it also captures subjects not normally associated with the natural world: a dentist’s chair covered in algae, a sunken U-boat, and a group of workmen’s tools that stand vertically as if supported by invisible men.
Mr. Kirkbride belongs to an extended clan that spends part of each year on a family compound in Water Mill as well as in New York City and Hove, England. He’s been taking underwater photographs for 25 years, but this is his first book. Kodak donated the film and covered the cost of developing, but Mr. Kirkbride and his wife, Hazel, researched all the dive spots, wrote the book proposal, and wrote the amazingly detailed accounts of the life aquatic that accompany each of the photos.
“We knew what we wanted to do,” Mr. Kirkbride said last month at Hammer Galleries in New York City, “but we didn’t always know how to do it. People along the way were incredibly helpful. They loved the idea of what we were doing and fed off that, which was good because I was running tired.”
The most challenging part of the project, Mr. Kirkbride said, wasn’t giving up his lucrative commercial photography career, it was finding the best dive spots in each state and synchronizing the dives with seasonal and lighting conditions.
“Take Louisiana,” he said. “It has oil rigs off the coast, but I’d taken that photo for Mississippi. But Louisiana has one-third of all the wetlands in America. So we drove around the swamps, through huge lotus plants and alligator infestations, until we found something I liked.”
Settling on an image of the giant lotus leaves from the surface of the water, Mr. Kirkbride decided to take his chances with alligators, and go for a dive. “I saw one small one,” he said, which lulled him into a false comfort zone. “The second I got out of the water an alligator surfaced, right next to me, and swallowed a blackbird whole.”
Halfway across the country, on a dive in Iowa, Mr. Kirkbride found a sunken 1940s-vintage truck under the waters of West Okoboji Lake. The rusty vehicle piqued his curiosity and he went to a nearby museum to do a little research. “My father was a historian,” Mr. Kirkbride said, “so I love that sort of thing. But I consider myself more a photographer than a writer.”
He learned that the truck had been used to haul and deliver ice in the 1940s and sank on Jan. 6, 1948. The company, which was struggling to compete with refrigeration, couldn’t afford to replace it, and a year later the business closed.
One of the most haunting photos isn’t of a ghostly wreck or a submerged tombstone (though both are in the book), but of a lake near a power station in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. Smoke pours from the plant’s cylindrical chimneys, under heavy leaden skies. The image was shot through a lens half-submerged in inky water, as if the creature from the black lagoon had just poked its head up.
The plant, which is more than 3,200 feet above sea level, requires 234,000 gallons of water for cooling every day. Sometimes the water temperatures reach 95 degrees, and few fish survive. Mr. Kirkbride’s picture does what words sometimes can’t, presenting the hell of an ecosystem in freefall.
In the Channel Islands, eight hours off the coastline of Santa Barbara, Calif., Mr. Kirkbride orchestrated a dive with a posse of sea lions frolicking beneath the waves. It shows nature at its most harmonious and fecund best.
“I knew I wanted to take pictures of the sea lions,” Mr. Kirkbride said. “But I didn’t want to do it with a boatload of other divers. I had to rent a 30-person dive rig. We left in the dark and crossed the San Pedro Channel. At 5:30 a.m. we were anchoring and I thought I had four hours to shoot. But the captain said I had 45 minutes before the tide would turn.”
Jumping into the water alone with 150 sea lions was “fantastic,” he said, “but it’s obviously better to dive with someone,” hinting at the enormous risks involved every time a diver enters the water.
Dive shops are few and far between in North Dakota. But Mr. Kirkbride did his homework and discovered there was a 10-day crayfish mating frenzy that took place in Spiritwood Lake. After speaking with one of the few dive shop owners in the state, he learned exactly what conditions were necessary to touch off the phenomenon, which depends upon the melting of the surface ice, and was able to plan an eight-day visit at the height of the “season.”
After five days, in murky water conditions at the bottom of the small lake, whose surface was covered with whitecaps, he documented the largest crayfish he had ever seen mating 300 miles southeast of the state’s Badlands.
Large-format prints from the book can be seen at Hammer Galleries in New York City by appointment, and more information can be found at www.alexkirkbride.com.