photography and video of traditional breath-hold divers in Hava’u, Tonga
work-in-progress in collaboration with Dr Adrian Bell, University of Utah
Photo exhibition January through April 2024 in the lobby of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, open hours Monday- Friday 9h-17h
Click on images below for photo galleries or scroll to bottom for video montage
Tonga has a breath hold diving tradition of men who spearfish at night, both for subsistence of family and friends and for sale to market. They hunt primarily for fish, spiny lobster, octopus, squid, and crabs, but also seek out giant clams. They dive at night because of the different behavior of prey, facilitating larger catches. Sometimes, divers will swim out directly from shore, particularly if they are subsistence hunting for the consumption of family and friends. At other times, particularly when diving for sale to market, divers will rent a place on a dive boat and go out to further reefs, spending the whole night out diving, alternating between an hour or two in the water and rest on the boat. The water temperature ranges between a low of 24C in August to 28C in February. The spearfishing is year-round. The men dive with fins, diving mask, and snorkel, wearing tights, long sleeve sports jerseys and gloves for sting and abrasion protection. They hunt using underwater flashlights and spears with an elastic lanyard used to propel the spear at the target. Rather than long dives, they do frequent, shorter dives of a minute or two. The choice to not use scuba or surface supplied air is reportedly an economic one, with the small increased financial returns from diving with such equipment not warranting the cost.
Tonga is one of the few places in the South Pacific that was not officially colonized by a European nation and is still governed independently as a kingdom. As such, the framework for resource management is set by the resource offices of the king. Potential fishing zones are set as one of three types: open access where anyone can fish or dive, local-use resource areas managed by a local village, and marine protected areas where spearfishing is forbidden. Access to the local fishing areas are set by the local community. Others may fish there, but only with permission from the community.
While diving can happen year round, it is still dependent on the weather and social events. If the weather is bad, people will not want to go out for safety reasons. If the weather has been windy, the seas get stirred up and the visibility is poor. Similarly, runoff from rain can affect visibility and reduce fishing returns. School reunions and church gatherings also heavily impact diving. On the one hand, they create a strong market demand for traditional sea products for serving at feasts, so diving will be busier than usual before them. During them, however, the whole community is involved, and so there will be very little diving.
In the 3 weeks i was in Hava’u, i was able to join for 4 nights of fishing: 3 boat trips for market fishing and one evening subsistence dive from shore.
I used a variety of techniques to document the diving, having to do some amount of adaptation to the night diving. For much of the above-water photography, I used my Panasonic GH5, as well as a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. For the underwater photography and video, I primarily used a Gopro Hero 10 and Hero 11 strapped to the flashlights of the divers capturing video, from which I extracted video stills. For the shore-diving, I also did some underwater follows, using my GH5 with an underwater housing. I also was able to use a DJI MavicPro drone for some aerial footage of the divers and the island context.
Click on the images to see galleries of photos from the 2023 trip as well as a rough montage of video footage from the divers. This is a work-in-progress and I hope to be able to get more footage in 2024.
Montage of raw video from Tongan divers