Just before Jialing Cai rolls backward off the side of a boat at midnight, the ocean beneath her is pitch-black. No depth, no bottom, and no point of reference. Just a thin string of dim lights falling into nothing, and a surface buoy above. The majority would remain on the boat. Cai enters anyhow.
She is a blackwater photographer, one of the few people in the world who actually does this on a regular basis, let alone with an award-winning eye. The idea behind the practice is almost ridiculously straightforward: dive into the open ocean at night, drift, and wait for the deep sea to rise and greet you. It’s a completely different matter when it comes to execution. You sink more quickly than you can comprehend if you lose buoyancy control. You run the risk of decompression if you surface too soon. There are no walls, landmarks, or coral to help you get around. There is nothing but darkness everywhere.
What truly emerges in that darkness is what elevates this beyond an extreme sporting stunt. Every night, trillions of zooplankton and larval organisms ascend hundreds of meters from the ocean’s twilight zone to feed close to the surface in what oceanographers refer to as the largest animal migration on Earth. They disappear once more by dawn. The majority of people will never be aware that this is taking place right beneath any particular view of the ocean. Cai takes a picture of it.
Her photos appear truly unearthly. Fingernail-sized transparent octopus larvae. Sea butterflies are small mollusks that seem to be flying through water instead of swimming. Gelatinous and tubular, salps are illuminated from within by their own biology. It seems as though someone has gained access to a portion of the planet that was not intended for human view when looking at the pictures. It appears that scientists concur. Southampton University ocean exploration researcher Professor Jon Copley has noted that net sampling, the conventional approach to studying mid-water creatures, destroys the very structures that make these animals unique. According to science, a photo taken in their home is unique.
Chongqing, a landlocked city in southwest China with no direct access to the sea, is where Cai was raised. The idea of diel vertical migration—the nightly ascent of deep-sea life—was introduced to her by a professor in a marine biology course at the University of Virginia, which is how she first became interested in diving. Hearing about it, according to her, felt like “a summons from the sea.” She might be being poetic. It’s also possible that’s precisely how it felt.
In 2023, one picture had a profound impact on her career. The picture, which was taken in the Philippines soon after a nearby volcanic eruption, depicts a female paper nautilus holding a drifting stick while suspended particles, including plankton, volcanic ash, and ocean sediment, scatter through the frame like snow. Snowy Night was the name she gave it. Most divers would have avoided the dive that day due to the poor visibility. Cai entered the murk after spotting a different kind of image there. She was awarded Ocean Photographer of the Year for it.
Finding the frame in situations that seem to be against it is an instinct that probably sets serious blackwater photographers apart from other photographers. The sea is uncooperative. Currents change. Animals disappear. In dirty water, the light exhibits peculiar behaviors. Nevertheless, there is something hard to describe in the photos that are returned from these dives. They have a subdued grandeur that serves as a reminder that the majority of the living drama on this planet takes place in the dark, unseen, and according to its own ancient schedule.
Cai is 28 years old. She has already dived in Antarctica, where the temperatures are close to freezing instead of the 27 degrees of warmth found in Southeast Asian waters. According to her own account, she’s still figuring it out. Her work doesn’t pretend to have fully arrived somewhere, which is perhaps its most honest quality. It continues to go in.
