Photographer Page

Laurent Ballesta

More than a hundred feet below the East Antarctic ice, French photographer and biologist Laurent Ballesta reveals a hidden bonanza of cold-water life. To capture this living mound of sponge, sea stars, and giant ribbon worms, Ballesta made a series of 32 dives in below-freezing temperatures, including the deepest, longest dive ever recorded for Antarctica.

On a nearly moonless night at Fakarava, members of photographer Laurent Ballesta’s team, swimming against the tidal current, hold the powerful lights he needs to photograph sharks as they hunt for groupers hiding in the reef.

A diver swims among gray reef sharks at night around the Fakarava atoll.

The Pacific tide rushes into the Fakarava lagoon via a 100-yard-wide channel. Like other atolls, Fakarava formed around a volcanic island that later sank. Storm-tossed coral debris helped raise parts of it above sea level.

Swimmers throughout the North Atlantic flee at the sight of this jellyfish, Pelagia nociluca, commonly known as the mauve stinger. Stinging cells cover its tentacles and entire body. But a black coral has paralyzed this one, off La Ciotat, in southern France. (From “They spent 28 days under the sea—and found another Earth,” April 2021.)

Off Marseille, 256 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, narwhal shrimp float in forests of black coral. (The coral is named for its black skeleton, but the living tissue is white.) The shrimp are around four inches long and send signals by touching antennae. In the Mediterranean bits of plastic have been found in their guts.

Laurent Ballesta was awarded Wildlife Photographer of the Year for this image of mating groupers.

A coelacanth swims in South Africa's Sodwana Bay. Long thought extinct, the animal was rediscovered in 1938.

On a nearly moonless night at Fakarava in French Polynesia, members of photographer Laurent Ballesta’s team, swimming against the tidal current, hold the powerful lights he needs to photograph sharks as they hunt for groupers hiding in the reef.

At night grey reef sharks hunt as a pack in the south channel of Fakarava Atoll, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia. Photographer Laurent Ballesta’s team, diving without cages or weapons, counted 700 sharks.