For most of us, enlightenment is a perpetual odyssey of ascent.

We rise out of shadowy slumber, battling amnesia attached to our dreams, only to arrive groggy and—if we're lucky—awakened by the glow of morning sun. 
 
We ask ourselves (if we still can remember them): Were the visions delivered to us real? 
 
In Wayne Levin's underwater oeuvre, heightened awareness is achieved in reverse: We are plunged forth into a tenebrous tableau, escaping the comfortable world we know, sinking ever deeper through the aquasphere as shifting elemental forces rearrange perception. 
 
Descending into the oceanic abyss, we are not put to sleep but jarred into a new state of consciousness, as if in the midst of unending REM.

Perhaps it is the primordial memory of amphibious ancestors calling us home to swim with sharks, whales, dolphins and seals; or maybe we are heeding beacon signals sent from long-lost Atlantis on the bottom.
 
Whatever archetypal allusion one desires to employ, Levin's entrancing photographs come across, first, as spare and stark yet they resonate in ways uncommon and lasting, even within the context of grand marine photography. 
 
A glimpse through Levin's viewfinder leaves us breathless.  Our response has little to do with lack of oxygen. It is, instead, a tingling visceral exclamation of how beautiful—and textural—Levin's milieu is in the absence of color. 
 
That's right, as Poseidon with a Nikonos V strapped to his arm, Levin, remarkably, gives the ocean environment an unforgettable voice in traditional black and white. "It has enabled me to deepen the visual experience, to portray a kind of surreal atmosphere analogous to what you might find in the sky," he says. 
 
Not long ago, Wildlife Art Journal spoke with the acclaimed photographer who was at his studio in Honaunau, Hawaii while preparing to leave for a dive off the South Kona Coast of the Big Island. 
 



In the same week, seven time zones away, Levin's images were headlining an international exhibition of "surfscapes" at CLIC Gallery in the Soho district of Manhattan. The showing included works by Tony Caramanico, Antoine Verglas, Jean-Philippe Piter and Burton Machen. "Wayne Levin, he's a legend," says gallery curator Pollyanna Campbell. 
 
For three decades, Levin's portfolio has indeed attracted a cultish following, especially among diehard surfers, divers, artists (of all media), and conservationists who inherently recognize the novel approach he courts with his realm. 
 
To put Levin's stature in perspective, his pictures are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Moreover, he has been featured in LensWork, Aperture, American Photographer, Camera Arts, Photo Japan, a special project, Day in the Life of Hawaii, and on the pages of the Patagonia clothing catalog.

 
Levin qualifies as "a nature photographer" but only as its rarest of Pratt-educated subspecies. "I don't think of myself as a documentarian or as a cataloger of animals," he explains. "While I'm definitely an environmentalist and have concerns about the harm being done to our oceans, my motivation is to interpret what I see as an artist. I enjoy enlivening the mystery of the ocean, not in trying to untangle it or give it explanation." 
 
The greater the mystery, he reckons, the more people will care to save it. Like hypnotic whispers sending subliminal messages to our psyches, Levin's portrayals can, on the one hand, exude as much heroic drama as a Wagnerian opera; just as easily, they can meditatively mesmerize in whirls of abstracted shapes and line emerging or quickly retreating into walls ambient diaphanous light. 
 
Eerie?

Foreboding?

Gloomy?

Some have described Levin's darker scenes as such, though a better word is transcendental, even allegorical if you are so inclined. They hold the eye, and the presence of only a single image in a room can fill it. 
 
Imagine: You are a body surfer with flippers on your feet who magically becomes a superhero in one of Levin's frames.

You soar heroically forward, bare-chested, threading openings in what seem to be roiling thunderclouds (in reality are pounding waves above).

Soon, on this merman's tour, you encounter tortoises suspended in cubist arrays of sunbeams tilted on their side like warped rings of Saturn. 
 
Raining before you are cyclones of akule schools. They forge sculptures that explode like confetti and dissipate as puffs of smoke, then reassemble and assume different masses.

Hovering at your side are the flapping wings of manta rays resembling pterodactyls (or stealth bombers); seals and dolphins performing acrobatics; and outlines of sharks looming in silhouette at the edge of range. 
 
Acclaimed American novelist and essayist Thomas Farber, who discovered Levin's work twenty years ago while in Hawaii to gather research for his book, On Water, was left enchanted the moment he happened on it. He sought out Levin and later penned an introduction to an award-winning picture book, Through A Liquid Mirror: Photographs By Wayne Levin. Levin's pictures are a poet's envy.

Farber wrote: "When we see the vast blue, we see not ocean, exactly, but surface; master trickster, chameleon, boundary between water and atmosphere, barrier or seal between two realities. Undulating, dancing, bending, stretching, reflecting on each side the world it faces while obscuring the other. From above, the illusion that reality remains the same as far as the mind can see, that even the other side of the mirror is more of the familiar, if distorted. Still, what's concealed makes itself deeply felt—we know there's more than meets the eye. Evoking, as Wayne Levin's noted, 'the obsessions of science fiction with another dimension that coexists in the same space as our own or parallel to it, the two divided by an invisible membrane." 
 
Liquid Mirror happens to also be Levin's apt email handle. He takes what 6.5 billion humans consider the sea-level floor for three quarters of the Earth's surface and inverts it into the ceiling of our common watery cathedral. 
 
Born in Los Angeles the year World War II ended, Levin came of age on the beaches of southern California at the dawn of modern surfing. His father handed him a Brownie camera on his 12th birthday; it came with a kit that allowed him to develop his own film, a practice he still enjoys 50 years later. 
 
Although softspoken, unassuming and modest, Levin has lived a life that sensitized him both to the natural world and the dynamic forces of human landscapes. His ocean work is an extension of his personal values and philosophical attitude. 
 
Following his first artistic love, Levin enrolled in the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara after graduation from high school in 1962. 
 
Idealistic, he fell into the company of activists involved with the Civil Rights Movement and beginning in 1964 quit college to volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the crescendo of racial tension in the Deep South. It was not for the feint of heart. 
 
Confronted with the irony of the times, Levin says his decision to take a sabbatical from formal education in order to pursue peaceful direct action for social justice left him open to become drafted into the U.S. war in Vietnam. Rather than wait for his number to be called and risk being assigned to the infantry, he enlisted in the Navy and spent seven months as a crewman on the USS Hornet patrolling the Vietnam coastline.  He avoided direct combat, all the while keeping a look out for the wildlife beneath the hull of the mighty aircraft carrier. 
 
Fatefully, during this same time, his family moved to Hawaii and upon his discharge in 1968, he joined them but not before traveling with cameras in hand throughout Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, Mexico and Central America. 
 
His penchant for distilling stories was noticed, and the pictures took during his global backpacking adventures won an invitation for a solo exhibition at Gima's Art Gallery and The Downtown Galleries' in Honolulu. He fell under the mentorship of Robert Wenkham, a highly respected nature photographer and activist in Hawaii, and received tutelage from Augie Salbosa, known for his architectural work. 
 





Opting against careers in photojournalism and traditional commercial studio shoots, he went to the mainland and studied fine art photography at the San Francisco Art Institute under Linda Connor, John Collier, Henry Wessell, Larry Sultan and Ellen Brooks. From Henri Cartier Bresson to Edward Weston, and Josef Koudelka, Paul Caponigro and Eugene Smith to Sabastiao Salgado, Linda Connor, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, examined the work of masters to decipher all angles of the two dimensional illusion. Still, he was insatiated and enjoyed the thought of photography as its own social force. 
 
Leaving San Francisco, hoping to teach, he set out for the other coast, received an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and counts his critiques from Arthur Freed and Phil Perkis as helping to expand his horizontal vision. "In the mid 70's I did a lot of black and white landscape photography using a 4x5 view camera," he says. "In this work I found myself drawn to the sea." 
 
Within months of graduating from Pratt, the University of Hawaii offered Levin a teaching position and he bought himself a Nikonos IV underwater camera as a "coming home present." Levin won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his visual study of surfers. As well, he was invited to make intimate portraits at the famous Leprosy Settlement at Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai. His work there from a quarter century ago, is now considered historic and Levin is currently involved in assembling a retrospective focusing on the legacy of that community. 
 
Never yielding was his spiritual bond with the riders of Hawaii's waves. "At first I tried shooting them in color, but was unhappy with the results. The photos were pretty much just blue, pale, flat and dreary," he says. "So I tried black and white which really opened things up. I was able to increase the contrast so that the images no longer had that murky appearance. Also, black and white lent an abstract quality to the images. The space was much more ambivalent in black and white, and the water itself sometimes disappeared." 
 
Churning surf, depicted below the surface, no longer came across as nondescript dark blotches but as eminently fascinating atmospherics. "The subjects," he says, "could appear to be flying in the sky or suspended in an empty void." 
 
People who saw his pictures in Hawaii were in awe and word—this is pre-internet—quickly spread among photo editors as Levin was approached with offers of compiling his shots in books. 
 
The switch to black and white enabled him to overcome a nagging earlier technical challenge. With color film, one needed a flash to achieve good color rendition. (Flash is necessary in order to get a full color spectrum. The warm tones (yellow - red) are quickly filtered out by water). Even with a strong beam, a focal point could only be illuminated within a range of six to eight feet. 
 
He realized he could pull back, and whether dealing, for example, with whales or shipwrecks, he was able to achieve monumentality in his subjects, converting limited depth of field into an assert. As in his picture, Spirits of the Night, a ray rising toward the surface resembled the corona enwrapping a star. 
 
Black and white turned Levin loose with an impressionistic license, which, in turn, he has made his artistic signature. What gives him supreme joy is creating open ended narratives in which outcomes are left to the viewer's own imagination. "Almost ten years after taking the early surf photographs I moved to Kona, and a friend suggested photographing the dolphins that frequent Kealakekua Bay. I began to photograph them which actually led to expanding into all kinds of aquatic animals," he says. Levin portrayed the icons and he elevated other creatures to iconistic status. 
 
As his body of work grew, he began to specialize in black and white. "It seemed that this was a very limited genre, so I decided to push the idea of black and white underwater in as many directions, and as far as possible," he adds. "I photographed subject maters as diverse as free divers, shipwrecks, aquariums, seascapes, fish schools, all within the limitations of black and white." 
 
Yes, aquaria. During one stretch, Levin visited major aquaria and portrayed the human attraction to the animals swimming behind sheets of glass. 
 
All of his major areas of thematic exploration are accessible at waynelevinimages.com where a wide range of collectors (corporate, prominent individuals, museums) have gone to order prints. In addition to Clic Gallery in New York, his work is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, Gallery North on Kauai and the Contemporary Museum Shop in Honolulu.

"Wayne Levin's photographs are simply stunning and kind of otherwordly," says writer David Helvarg, founder of the Blue Frontier Campaign devoted to ocean conservation.  Helvarg, a veteran body-surfer and diver, is also is the author of the new critically acclaimed book, Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes.  "I've never seen anyone portray the allure of the sea as he does,"  Helvarg adds.  "Whenever we use his images to help us call attention to things we're working on, the reaction is always incredible."
 
Of the Nikonos cameras that he prefers, Levin says. "The lenses, especially wide angle lenses, provide superb optics and are sharper than others I've used. I've remained with them over the years." 
 
Under wild conditions, the ever-changing convergence of factors—sunlight from above, cloud cover in the sky, the sudden appearance or vanishing of subject matter, architecture on the ocean floor, clarity of water, filtering influences of wind and waves—makes choreography of desired pictures almost impossible, Levin says. 
 
The role of photographer is simply to position oneself in a place to observe unfolding possible events. "More than anything what really excites me is when I see an image that is different from any I could have imagined or expected. And while I'm there in the moment, I think, 'Wow, where did that come from?' I'm always looking for things that push my vision in a new direction." 
 
Setting the f-stop and clicking the shutter, however, is merely the beginning of the process, which continues with editing back in his studio and then trying to accentuate in the darkroom the moments carried in his memory. In recent years, Levin says he has moved toward reproducing his work using digital printing, although he still relies on traditional darkroom printing techniques. 
 
Ask him, and Levin has a list of pure "nature photographers" he admires. However, he is more of a tonalist and his interest departs from literal translations, including his portraits of "water people" pursuing various forms of recreation. He credits Wynn Bullock and Minor White as being direct influences in his evolution. "Wynn Bullock because of the way he photographed motion in water, and Minor White because of the way he put still images together in sequences that became visual poems or songs, the way he worked with transitions between images." Pausing, he thinks, smiles and mentions another breed. "Surf movies had a profound influence on my early underwater work," he says. "In these moves the photographers would be in the waves, and would film the surfer coming toward them. Then, amazingly, as the wave would pass, they would duck underwater and catching the churning wave from underwater, as well as the underside of the passing surfboard." 
 




Levin's scope of work today serves as reference for a rapidly expanding group of stylistic protégées and college photography programs. "Ten years ago, there were just a few us working in black and white," he says. "Today more people are working in black and white underwater.” 
 
The image that appears on the cover of Wildlife Art Journal is of a lone Monk seal, among the most critically endangered mammals on the planet. He hopes his work draws attention to the seal's plight. Over the years, he has generously enabled his work to help conservation organizations raise money in pushing for protection of species from over harvest, creation of ocean refugia, and scientific research to better understand the complicated ecology of the marine food chain.

Whereas his early mentor Wenkham (who died in 2000 at age 80) once vowed to not publish any more "pretty" shots of Hawaii because they were leading to the islands being overrun by tourists, Levin is trying to elevate consciousness about what can be exploited but what is at stake. 
 
While Levin's work is hailed for its intimate feel, he is respectful of his subjects' space, be they animals or humans, prey species like akule or predators such as sharks. "I think the key to underwater photography is to interact without being aggressive. It is important to not show aggression or you will blow the encounter," he says. 
 
Traveling to diving spots around the globe, Levin says he arrived at his successful method of observation by accompanying divers, other photographers and spear fishermen. Collectively, he has spent thousands of hours, extending across months, years and decades in the water, and only a few brushes, he says, qualify as harrowing even among apex predators. "You have little control. You are in their space and observing mostly on their terms," he says. 
 
Have there been frightening encounters? "Yea," he says, "I've had some" but he notes the circumstances arose by other things happening in the water. In one encounter, he made a dive in deep ocean a few miles off the coast of Kona photographing a large pod of several hundred melon-headed whales, in smaller groups of 20. Levin said he was joined by a large oceanic whitetip shark, a species known for being both aggressive and curious. It has been linked to feeding frenzies on victims of shipwrecks and downed aircraft. The late oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau called them the most dangerous shark on earth. "They check people out at close range and until you understand, it can be unnerving," Levin says. "Normally, when its one on one, there isn't a problem." 
 
Later in the day, rare melon-headed whales (also known as the electra dolphin, and little killer whale) became more evasive. However, the large oceanic whitetip shark reappeared out of the depths. "Earlier, he would swim toward me and I would swim toward him and we would each veer off," Levin said. "But this time he charged, I look a picture and then noticed he's not turning away. He crashed into my fin. My diving partners thought I had been hit. I got out of the water and was unharmed. Friends in Kona have other stories of heavy duty encounters with oceanic whitetips which are numerous and considered one of the most dangerous sharks out there." 
 
Still, Levin says the level of fear that persists with people on shore is exaggerated and irrational. Mammal biologists who have spent their careers studying grizzly bears are not often attacked because they understand the behavioral nuances of the animal. The same is true with marine life, he notes. 
 
Levin shares tales of gathering with friends half a century ago at Santa Monica Pier to fish for mackerel and bonito. He recalls taking a half-day launch and dropping down a line for trophies. "I remember how proud I was of myself when I caught a barracuda," he says. "Now that I am older I have very mixed feelings about fishing. I don’t like watching beautiful fish suffer and die on the deck of a fishing boat but I often admire the skill of the fishermen." 
 
As a way of evening the karmic score, he produces spectacular picture books and limited edition, large format photos in tribute to the creatures he swims with. Among his favorite are the schools of humble akule, the topic of a new coffee table volume coming out in the fall of 2009. "I want to encourage awareness of the fragility of this amazing world," he says, "and present the threat to its very existence." 
 
The photographer who once campaigned for civil rights has given voice to the ocean. He knows the moving force and redemptive power of beauty. For him, the mysterious reality of the deep is more resonant than any dream.

EDITOR'S NOTE:  For more of Wayne Levin's ocean odyssey, visit Wayne Levin Images  waynelevinimages.com