Just offshore, another world
Diver's photos reveal splendor under the sea
Sixty feet below the surface of the waters off Cape Ann, it's silent. Murky. Cold.
The current jostles bodies like plastic bags in an updraft. Visibility is about 10 feet.
Yet in those harsh conditions, a riot of life thrives. Reefs flare with color - anemones in brilliant orange, yellow, white, and red. Striped bass dart back and forth in silvery flashes. Lobsters and crabs emerge curiously from reefs, brandishing open claws. Plants dance seductively.
To 56-year-old Salem diver and photographer Donald Whitehead, it is a stunning, vast, and challenging world.
"It's about as removed from my everyday life as I could get," he said. "It puts me in a place that is so different. I just can't get enough of it."
You'd never know all of it was there, just off the shoreline. But the cold Atlantic waters that meet the North Shore coast are teeming with plants and all manner of creatures - and Whitehead has devoted the last 30 years to photographing them.
His work, a mixture of color and black-and-white, depicts giant flounder swimming flat along the ocean floor; starfish sprawled out in clustered carpets; skates camouflaged in sand; and upended, corroded, barnacle-covered ships.
"It's fascinating that there's a whole other world right here in Salem that most of us don't have access to," said Gary LaParl, president of the Salem Arts Association and retail manager at the Salem gallery sass:C, which is currently showing a selection of Whitehead's photos, called "The Undersea World of Salem Sound." "You have no idea of the color. It's gorgeous. The textures are fascinating."
As are the stories. Whitehead, a longtime North Shore resident and project manager at Boston's Pearson Custom Publishing, has made close to 500 dives - and those underwater excursions have left him with a stockpile of tales.
For instance, his left hand bears faint, decades-old scars left from grasping barnacle-covered rocks during a barrage of four-foot-high waves. At the time, he was untrained, uncertified, and using old equipment that spent a winter frozen to a friend's lawn. "It was reckless," he said with a shrug, "but that was youth."
He'll also reminisce about swimming with harbor seals that playfully bit his flippers while dancing in an "underwater ballet," or trekking to a tanker ship, 95 dark and disorienting feet below Gloucester's waves.
"It's awe-inspiring to see this vessel sitting on the bottom with fish swimming in and out of it," Whitehead explained from a seat in his living room, framed seascapes covering the white walls around him.
Many of his dives have been to sunken ships, nearly all of which he can name and give their detailed histories.
Most have been reduced to dregs from the roiling tide - they are pockmarked by tossed-around pieces of hull, twisted hunks of metal, rotted wood, and thousands of small items such as bolts and hinges. "There's very little that resembles a ship," Whitehead noted.
The photographer's apartment seems a debris field all its own (a well-organized one, at least). It's jammed with dozens of found items hauled up from the deep.
There are copper spikes cast in Paul Revere's foundry; antique bottles, from the hourglass classics made by
He also retrieved a warped brass carpenter's rule, separated at the hinges and imprinted with inch markings. A century-old stone jug that once held preserves. A pewter spoon, handle curved over head like a piece of ribbon candy.
Other findings are less discernible. Take a piece of flattened copper that sits on a shelf in Whitehead's bedroom: He thinks it might have once been part of a chimney. Another small, jagged arc of metal could be the shattered piece of a steam whistle.
Whitehead's most prized discovery, however, is a 7-foot-8-inch piece of a rudder. Two hinge-like pintles (pivot pins), corroded green and rounded smooth, bind three chunks of jagged, rotted oak streaked with rust stains. "I never found the wreck," said Whitehead, the artifact displayed on the floor by his sandaled feet. "I think it's still there, waiting to be found."
As are a rich multitude of exotic crustaceans, other creatures, and plants.
Whitehead is particularly intrigued by underwater flora, which he said waves and beckons with the current in strokes of olive, golden brown, and bright green.
He also described an endless panoply of fish that peer into his mask, and tiny organisms that seem to go on forever on reef faces.
"The smaller you go, the bigger the universe becomes," he said. "There's no end to the stuff you can photograph down there."
He uses an amphibious Nikon camera equipped with an 18mm wide-angle lens, which he mounts at the center of a u-shaped contraption with two strobe lights.
The hundreds of images he's shot with it over the last several years have appeared in gallery shows and a 2005 guidebook, "Diving Cape Ann and Boston's North Shore."
Photography has been a passion since his teens - he's always been fascinated with the idea of telling a story with just one frame.
His strength, say fans of his work, is catching crisp, bright shots in an often hazy, clamorous environment.
"I like the way he uses natural light," said David Stillman, owner of Cape Ann Divers in Gloucester, noting dancing kelp and sandy topography.
He also helps reinforce the notion that New England seas are very much alive. "Most people think there's nothing to see up here," Stillman asserted. But "it makes for beautiful pictures."
Beautiful and challenging: Whitehead described lugging 20-pound tanks, scrubbing sea salt from equipment, and fighting the boisterous seas - and all that for only about two hours of total dive time.
Still, it's those trials that draw him to diving.
"That's what I love about it," he said. "It's a consuming passion." 