If capturing the good shot means traveling to a river site after dark, donning a dry suit, lugging the underwater camera and strobe lighting equipment across slippery ledges to pools beside the river, lying down in the water and waiting patiently for the subject to appear, photographer Heather Perry of Bath is up for the challenge.
A person with seemingly limitless enthusiasm and energy, who says she is happiest “in, on and under the water,” Perry will go out before dawn, get into a small plane, sit in a gunning boat with a duck hunter and dog, dive underwater – whatever it takes. Her next plan is to crawl into a fyke net at night and lie there on her stomach so she can capture even better images of glass eels to add to a portfolio on eels, which she has been working on for two years.
Perry, 32, who lives in Bath with her husband Dick,
a teacher who gamely assists on the nighttime eel forays, became fascinated with eels when she was working on a photographic study of Merrymeeting Bay, a project begun in 2000 and still ongoing. “For two years I had been trying to cover every aspect of the bay,” she says: “aerial, people, duck hunting, shipbuilding, underwater, the species that go through it. It occurred to me that the eels were particularly fascinating as a subject because we know so little about them and they have not been photographed successfully in the wild before. This intrigued me, and it became a great challenge to photograph them.”
She quickly learned why they had not been photographed before, she explained while giving a slide show of her work on Merrymeeting Bay, the Kennebec River and eels at the Phippsburg Land Trust Annual Meeting in August. The eels come to the surface only at night, don’t like lights, and will appear in one place, then disappear and show up somewhere else. “I’ve had some really frustrating moments,” she says. Sometimes, she has heard that eels were in an area, made all her preparations to photograph them, and then found that they had moved on.
Perry’s eel work begins in late April or early May when she learns from harvesters, dealers and Department of Marine Resources (DMR) scientists that glass eels are beginning to show up in river mouths. The eels, which are one of few catadromous (living in fresh water, spawning at sea) species, are on their journey from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea to upriver locations where they will spend the next 20 years growing to maturity before they return to the spawning grounds. Along the way upriver, the glass eels become pigmented and turn into elvers. From May until September, Perry tracks elvers up the Kennebec River to the dam at Fort Halifax, where she has seen them climb the dam rather than use an eel ladder put in by Skip Zink, a DMR biologist who works with eels.
Encouraged by a photo editor’s positive response to the eel photographs she had amassed by last September, Perry began to devote her freelance time more exclusively to eel photography. She aims to return to the editor with an expanded body of work this winter and hopes to land an assignment that would pay for trips to Asia and Europe where eels are valued as food and are an important part of the economy. She also would like to photograph them in the Sargasso Sea.
“Once I get this body of work that nobody else has, I can package it in many ways,” she says – “a children’s book, an illustrated edition of a book already published on eels, magazine stories, some stock [photos].” (She already has diverse images under contract with the National Geographic Image Collection, which provides photos for multiple uses.) “It depends on what level I can take the work to. As strictly a freelance effort, I don’t have the resources to do much beyond New England.”
Perry is the first professional photographer in her family, but she says she comes from a very musical and creative family, and that her parents have encouraged her to follow this love. “They were incredibly generous,” she says, allowing her to live rent free with them in Connecticut when she decided to quit a job she took with Sea World after graduating from Colby in 1993 with a degree in marine sciences.
She has been interested in photography and art from an early age, but because she was on the swim team in high school and college, she didn’t have the time or opportunity to study photography until after college. While at Sea World, she discovered an underwater camera languishing in a closet and decided since the animals “couldn’t get away from me,” she would experiment with using the camera. The process so intrigued her, the next summer she attended Brook’s Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, and then returned to live with her parents. The rest of her training has been on the job. “I pretty much studied in the field by trial and error and every chance I had, talking with professionals whose work I admired,” she says.
Five years ago, Perry asked freelance photographer Bill Curtsinger, who has been published in National Geographic and other major magazines, to take her on as his assistant. He refused at first, but she kept going back and asking again and again until he finally relented. He calls her “the pit bull.” Observing and working alongside Curtsinger has given her invaluable experience in the field, and, as manager of his office, she has learned strategies to cope with the side of freelancing dreaded by most freelance artists: marketing their creations. “We put our heart and soul into our work, and then it’s very difficult to be removed enough from it to be able to haggle over it and try to market it,” says Perry. “It’s difficult not to make it personal.”
She gave “a zillion” slide shows in Connecticut to fund photography trips to Micronesia, the Galapagos and the Caribbean, and once settled back in Maine, she began to photograph the Gulf of Maine, the Kennebec and Merrymeeting Bay. Altogether, she has put together a large body of work, which includes marine and freshwater natural history, surface images, aerial photos, environmental portraits and people. Many of her photographs can be viewed at www.heatherperryphoto.com.