Still Life in Water Colors

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Nothing prepared Lily Honegger for what she saw on her first Red Sea dive in 1972. A scuba novice, she had braved only the chilly, relatively lifeless Mediterranean. But off the coast of Sudan, she discovered a community of coral and manta rays, reef sharks and tropical fish. She marveled at nature's palette, with its startling yellows, brown-tinged reds and bold blues. Then a fashion buyer, Honegger thought: "Someone should make a collection out of this."

A collection, it turns out, and a career. Photographic film has since become Honegger's fabric, the sea her muse. She and her husband Otto have created a pictorial record of the creatures found in and around coral reefs. The Swiss couple's images — a selection is now showing at Munich's Burda Focus Passage and will transfer to Offenburg in September — capture elements of marine life even more colorful than those they first saw in the Red Sea.

The Honeggers make three or four diving trips annually. First, they pick a destination. They go to the Maldives at least once a year and also dive frequently in Indonesia. Next comes research: what creatures can we expect to find, at what depth and on which reef? Then there are the logistics, from preparing their two underwater cameras and packing the dozens of rolls of film needed on a three-week trip to arranging boats to take them out to sea.

The two view the underwater world from different perspectives. Take the blue giant clam. Lily Honegger, her eye trained by the fashion world to look for patterns and hues, sees robust swirls and stripes of blue and black. "The combination of colors is unbelievable," she says. "This is abstract art, and a painter couldn't do better." Otto Honegger examines, with his scientist's lens, a living, breathing sample of Tridacna maxima, one of the more common giant clams, with a range from East Africa to Polynesia. As a youth, he had wanted to become a scientist. For family reasons, he studied business instead. Now a television producer, Otto finds marine photography a way of returning to his first love, biology.

Of course, there's no guarantee that a subject like the giant clam — the Garbo of shellfish that, well, clams up at the slightest disturbance — will be ready, willing or even around when the Honeggers go down. To maximize their chances of finding the creatures, they dive during both day and night. After dark, crabs and lobsters come out to feed. The Honeggers also rely on locals and other divers to point out promising spots. Their search for the flamboyant cuttlefish (Metasepia pfefferi) ended off an Indonesian air base in the Moluccas — not an obvious place to dive. But as Lily Honegger notes, "Wherever you go, you just have to chat with people and ask, ‘What's there?' There are things you can only find in a few places."

And increasingly, some you can't find at all. As longtime divers, the Honeggers have been firsthand witnesses to three decades of change in the coral reefs. The environmental threats are real, and most of them are human. In the Maldives, the Honeggers frequently find scars on reefs where divers have broken off pieces of coral as illegal souvenirs or where boats have put down anchors. They have also noted a decline in the number of reef sharks. The prime suspect: the illicit finning industry, which feeds the Far East's appetite for shark's fin soup.

The Honeggers also cite dynamite fishing as a major threat to tropical reef life. Controlled underwater explosions knock fish unconscious, allowing fishermen to net those that float to the surface and send divers to retrieve any that sink. But the dynamite doesn't know a parrotfish from a prawn. The blast kills not only the fish but also the other species, including corals, which can take decades, even centuries, to mature. Off Malaysia a few years ago, the Honeggers came across a dynamited reef. "You could see the coral skeletons," Lily Honegger says. "There was nothing else there, just bare rock, just gray and brown."

Sometimes nature fights back. Scientists have pointed to coral bleaching — the loss of the symbiotic algae that give corals their color — as a symptom of global warming. After the sea temperature in the Indian Ocean rose about a degree in 1998, bleaching hit the Maldives hard. The reefs, once shades of blue, orange and yellow, turned pinkish-grey. But now the corals are regenerating. "It's like a garden in spring, with all the little corals coming back," Honegger says. "This is nature. It's absolutely nature." And it may be more adaptable than we once thought. New research suggests that, contrary to earlier hypotheses, coral bleaching may be nature's way of trading one alga for another that's better suited to a changing environment.

The resilience of the reefs is good news for the Honeggers, who have many dives left on their to-do list. This summer they will return to the Maldives, which they call their personal paradise and where they have seen new species on every visit — a different clam one time, another nudibranch the next. They'd also like to return to the still-pristine waters of Papua New Guinea, where, on their last trip, they saw species they had sought for years, such as the whitemargin stargazer (Uranoscopus sulphureus), a fish that burrows in the sand on the sea floor.

The photographs are the Honeggers' way of sharing all that they find below the surface with those who stay above. But don't call them the artists. Says Lily Honegger: "Nature is the artist," one with such creativity that on each reef and in every sea, "the landscape is different, the colors are different and the species are different." Even the waters are different: the Red Sea provides a bluer filter, the oceans around the Bahamas a greener one. Just one thing remains the same — the sense of wonder on each dive, as the creatures show off on a coral catwalk, displaying colors and patterns as stunning as that very first time.