When most photographers head out into the field, they pack the essentials: camera lenses, external hard drives, battery chargers, a portable light source.
But for a recent New York Times assignment, Michael Turek, a Brooklyn-based freelance photographer, needed some unusual equipment: an oxygen tank, a diving mask and swim fins.
Wearing a rented wetsuit, Mr. Turek made several trips to Far Rockaway, Queens, this summer. While a man in full scuba regalia might turn heads in Manhattan, he is not out of place near Beach Eighth Street, a small dive site off the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. The waters in this area draw the city’s scuba enthusiasts. And Mr. Turek, a documentary photographer with a scuba diving certification, was there to capture images of those who brave the murky waters.
His photographs of divers in the Rockaways and other waters around New York City, along with accompanying text by the freelance writer Arielle Domb, were published in The Times last week.
The photo essay was months in the making, but the idea for it came to Ms. Domb about a year ago. After the Titan submersible imploded in June 2023, Ms. Domb, who enjoys writing about subcultures, began researching diving communities, and was surprised to learn that New York City had a robust one.
Many divers in the New York region enjoy the aquatic life; others are drawn to shipwrecks, collateral from hundreds of years of maritime traffic, some at depths that humans can reach. (By some estimates, there are as many as 5,000 shipwrecks scattered in “Wreck Valley,” a triangle of water between the Jersey Shore and Long Island.)
“I’ve always been interested in learning why people are obsessed with things, particularly things I don’t understand,” Ms. Domb said. That included, she added, exploring the passion that “made people go through all these things to dive in New York.”
Submerging in waters off the New York coast comes with logistical, technical and physical challenges: The hobby is expensive; equipment is hard to store and wash; the water can be cold; the currents are often dangerous; and visibility is extremely poor — not from pollution, but from sediment and organic particulates, which can tinge the water green.
“If you can see your fins, that’s very good visibility,” said Mr. Turek, who got his scuba diving certification in 2012 and has since taken part in 19 underwater assignments, including in Indonesia, Panama and the Maldives.
But those tropical waters were clear, and colorful coral and sea creatures were easy to spot and photograph. He had never before dived in New York’s pea-soup waters. (Ms. Domb, who said she nearly drowned twice while attempting to scuba dive when she was 19, reported exclusively on land.)
Of the half a dozen New York shorelines Mr. Turek traversed for the assignment — including off the Ponquogue Bridge in Hampton Bays, N.Y., down to the shipwreck of the Oregon off Long Island and in the East River — he most enjoyed diving off the Rockaways, where he could see planes arriving and departing from Kennedy International Airport.
“There is a higher level of skill required,” Mr. Turek said of navigating the area’s darker, cloudier waters. “I think when you obtain that, you abstract a greater level of pleasure from the whole experience.”
For most of his dives for the project, Mr. Turek was joined by Harris Moore, who teaches an introductory diving course for Big Apple Divers, a nonprofit club that has operated since 1971.
They targeted specific windows of time, typically the 30-to-40-minute period called slack tide, when the water is still. They checked their oxygen gauges and buoyancy-compensating devices before submerging, and then monitored them constantly throughout the dive. Mr. Turek and Mr. Moore also discussed protocol if they became separated underwater; namely, how long to search for the other before returning to the surface.
Because of the difficulties inherent in photographing underwater — and in such murky conditions — many of Mr. Turek’s photographs feature people bobbing just above the waterline. But that was fine with him: The goal of the article was always “to show who these people are,” he said. To that end, he also spent time with students and faculty members of the New York Harbor School on Governors Island, as well as members of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit working to restore the city’s oyster population.
Mr. Turek does not usually dive recreationally, and he rented all of his equipment for this assignment. But it might not be the last time he jumps into New York’s waters.
“Diving with horseshoe crabs in Queens is the first time that really made me feel like I want to get my own gear and do this regularly,” he said. “Hanging around with enthusiastic, passionate people like these is the best thing in the world.”
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