Sitting in Marine Biology 101 during her first year at the University of South Carolina, Julia Bennett was peering through a microscope at a slide of squirming diatom plankton when wonder struck.
“They look like something constructed for a science fiction movie,” said Bennett, now a senior. “We were making drawings and recording numbers and doing all this science stuff, and I couldn’t get over how perfect and symmetrical and intricate they are. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t everyone want to look at these?’”
So began Bennett’s fascination with capturing the least charismatic—but most critical—of ocean creatures under a magnification 40-100 times their normal size.
“If you change the angle of the light in the microscope, that does amazing things,” she said. “The live samples naturally have these incredible colors and layers.”
For her series Into the Umbra, Bennett collected samples while studying abroad in Brisbane, Australia. She captured specimens with a lens specifically designed for microscopes, sometimes illuminating slides with LED lights from above. She was delighted to find that when photographed through a microscope, drops of seawater look like the outer reaches of the cosmos. To Bennett, it felt fitting that the building blocks of life on earth resembles the celestial.
“More people have been to the moon than to the bottom of the ocean,” she said. “We’re concerned with these extraterrestrial frontiers, but we have this frontier right here on our planet that we are ignoring and destroying.”
Bennett points out there’s nothing exotic about the species in her photos.
“Any liter of sea water will contain up to a million of these organisms with hundreds of different species,” she said. “Take the sapharina with their crazy blues and purple—they’re beautiful and they swim around in the ocean, and nobody ever sees them.”
The photographer believes that some of us are far more likely to be affected by a single, elegant image than a powerfully written scientific paper. Her images pulse with an awe of this overlooked frontier, and she hopes they inspire more careful consideration of our marine environment.
“This family of species are really the first that are affected by ocean acidification,” said Bennett. “People are concerned with charismatic creatures like dolphins, sea turtles, and whales, and those are obviously important. But it’s the huge amount of productivity of these planktons that are responsible for oceanic life. If they fall off, everything else will follow.”
