Few people have ventured into the subterranean, submerged world Martin Broen captures so exquisitely on camera. The award-winning photographer, expert technical diver, and renowned industrial product designer combines his expertise and artistic prowess to create mind-blowing images documenting the beauty below the surface of the Yucatan Peninsula.
For this work, Broen ventures through caves and sinkholes known as cenotes, tunnels filled with groundwater that often require the Argentina-born, New York-based visual artist to spend hours underwater. “It is challenging,” Broen admits. “There are situations where you’re not able to pass through [the tiny crawlspaces and intense currents] without taking off your gear and passing it to your dive buddy. Then you deflate your buoyancy compensator and squeeze through. I don’t love that part, but I can deal with it because of the training I’ve had to get to the objective.”
MIND-BENDING EXPERIENCES
While Broen has been diving for three decades, initially at a recreational level, photography came later. On one trip, he recalls, “I found myself in translucent water flying over an enchanted forest in a cenote called Angelita. Below me was what looked like a vast cloud, with dead branches of trees poking out. I tried to capture the surreal scene on my GoPro but no pictures conveyed what I saw. I was so frustrated. I thought, I have to learn photography and underwater photography in particular.” He also recognized it was time to up his diving game. “I also started getting into more technical diving,” Broen says. “I had to improve my photography and my technical diving at the same time.”
Broen initially focused on the technical photographic genres he could practice on terra firma, including astrophotography, macro, and infrared. “Trying a lot of different techniques got me excited,” he says. “I managed to cross-pollinate and bring the knowledge back into underwater photography.” He has since created images in 250 cenotes.
Cenotes are a result of geological processes spanning hundreds of thousands of years, Broen explains. “All the Yucatan is primarily limestone, which is porous, so the water does not accumulate above-ground, so you don’t have rivers on the surface,” he says, adding that these bodies include both saltwater and freshwater, which have different densities, so the fresh water literally sits on top of the saltwater. While diving in that environment, “It’s like going in and out of the water, but you’re [still] inside of water. It’s a mind-bending experience.”
The objective is to capture the cenotes’ stunning, historic, and in many cases prehistoric surrounds, as seen in his new book, “Light of the Underworld” (Rizzoli). In addition to housing the natural wonders of stalactites and stalagmites, cenotes are time capsules for well-preserved fossils, including those of ancient Paleo-Americans and extinct megafauna. The Mayans, who believed that gods resided in this mystical underworld, also left their mark—literally—by decorating the now-submerged caves with paintings and sculptures.
While there are many underwater photographers, there are relatively few technical divers who are photographers. Broen explains the difference between a technical and typical diver is the depth of their destinations: “Technical diving exceeds 150 feet using multiple tanks with multiple gas mixes. You start putting helium in the mix to be able to go deeper. I’ve been as deep as 300 feet.”
How does one navigate and stay calm in this unforgiving environment? Physical training and mental toughness are key, Broen explains. “If you get to that instinctive fight-or-flight point, you cannot control your body. If you freeze, you need somebody to take you out of that mindset,” he says. “The key is to push the limit but not trigger that reaction. In other words, everything’s about understanding how to never get there by knowing your techniques and knowing your limits. In the same way that you refine a photographic technique, you get gradually more complicated with the diving techniques.”
Broen typically works with at least one other diver not just for safety but also so he can have a model. “If I don’t put a dive buddy in the photo, you lose a sense of proportion, perspective, and scale in this type of environment,” he says. “The viewer won’t know if you’re shooting a detail shot or it’s really a 300-foot chamber. So, for me it’s fundamental to dive with one person, sometimes two.”
BRINGING THE LIGHT
Low light levels are one of the many challenges of underwater cave photography, according to Broen. He uses Sony full-frame cameras, often with a Canon fisheye or a Nikonos R 13mm adapted lens with a wet lens on top of it. “Frequently I’m shooting at 1/10th of a second and ISO 6400 with the diaphragm open,” he says. “It’s not a problem to be shooting at a high ISO because I can reduce the noise using Topaz.” The camera goes into his Nauticam underwater housing, which he clips to his back; navigating through a cave is impossible with a camera in his hands. “I need to have my hands free to signal, to check my equipment, to go through a tight space,” he says, “or to use a scooter [a diver propulsion vehicle], which is like a torpedo to go through a larger cave.”
For creative shots in extremely low light situations, Broen will bring along his lights or a tripod that he 3D-printed using carbon-infused plastic. He also has designed floats using travel neck pillows for his Bigblue dive lights, and other custom gear using his extensive experience in industrial design.
“Probably 80% of my experiments fail, but the other ones allow me to do things that other people are not doing,” Broen says. “I’m very comfortable with a ‘test-to-learn’ or ‘rapid-fail-to-learn’ approach, experimentation, and cross-pollination of techniques. I see capturing a difficult scene in difficult conditions as a design challenge to be solved. You create a hypothesis and you do very fast tests to validate that. You know that you’re going to have sacrificial concepts to get data, and learn and evolve very fast from that.”
Broen says when his experiments don’t work, it’s learning, not failing. He applies those same techniques to planning how to get the best photographs. “I research a lot, go into the field, try it, fail, understand exactly why, go back, learn from what went wrong, refine it, try again, and the third time get it perfect and bring it back into the cave so I can do it,” he says. ”For example, I’ve done light trails in pitch-black caves by attaching lights onto a scooter.”
He also donates his 3D-modeling expertise to help the scientific community record hard-to-reach underwater fossils and artifacts.
SURREAL IMAGES WITH A PURPOSE
Broen admires the work of underwater photographers such as Alex Mustard (with whom he took a workshop), Paul Nicklen, Alex Dawson, and Tobias Friedrich, and is inspired by the team that captured the visuals for biologist, historian, and broadcaster David Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” series for BBC. Yet it’s Broen’s background in design that has most influenced his eye. “I like the European school of design, everything that evolved from the Bauhaus into the German-style design. But then, I grew up professionally in Milan and was exposed to a lot of inspiring Italian design,” he says. “I also love the Dutch School and the super clean Nordic designs.”
The variety of colors he records in the Yucatan’s underwater wonderland are fascinating. “This is not Photoshop. These are natural colors. That’s why it’s so surreal. I’m capturing the reality here,” he says. “Some of the images have a greenish hue, for instance, because of the rain washing the tannin from the tree bark into the water. When it’s very intense it starts becoming yellow, and if it’s impressively heavy, it becomes red. So, all this is natural. I use sunlight and, when necessary, dive lights. Everything you see in my photos are the natural colors of the cave.”
While a goal of Broen’s is to create stunning photographs, his book has a deeper purpose: awareness and preservation. “The fresh water of the cenotes sustains all the life of the ecosystem above. The most important thing about my book is to bring awareness and help protect that environment that we’re destroying,” he says. “Human activities have caused significant environmental disruptions, including climate change, deforestation, pollution, and loss of biodiversity, so I’m putting most of my energy into conservation projects focusing on sustainability and innovation.”
Mark Edward Harris is an award-winning photographer and writer based in Los Angeles.
Tags: nature photography
