The pandemic dealt photographers setbacks—and surprises

Photographer and National Geographic Fellow Anand Varma makes high-definition images of tiny creatures with techniques he develops.

By Anand A. Varma
photographs by Anand Varma
Published 22 Dec 2020, 11:59 GMT, Updated 22 Dec 2020, 18:01 GMT
In a home lab Varma has been raising moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita).

In a home lab Varma has been raising moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita).

Photograph by Anand Varma
This story appears in the January 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine. It is part of a series in which five contributors answer the question “What was it like to be a photographer in 2020?”

I spent early 2020 in a UC Riverside lab filming hummingbirds, trying to come up with new techniques for capturing their movements and behaviour. The pandemic ended that; in mid-March we had to leave the university, and the whole state locked down.

Normally I live with four other housemates; that grew to eight. It was sort of an impromptu commune and a wonderful time. We all really bonded, and I got to reconnect with folks I hadn’t spent much time with when I was on the road eight or nine months a year.

Varma has been a National Geographic photographer since 2011.
Photograph by Michael Parmelee

I have a fellowship from National Geographic and the Rita Allen Foundation to study jellyfish. Initially it was to be a global project: flying to Japan, visiting aquariums, filming and photographing in the ocean. But even before COVID-19, I had been preparing to do more work at home, in a detached garage I use as a lab. I had set up a tank with guidance from Steve Spina of the New England Aquarium, and he FedExed me jellyfish. So in quarantine I focused on one species of moon jelly (photo, top), trying to coax all of their secrets out of them in front of the camera.

By midsummer, the tank was getting a little dirty, so I cleaned it—and the polyps in the tank, the early life stage, began to transform. I walked in one day and saw a little brown structure standing out against all these white polyps! This metamorphosis is the basis of my whole jellyfish project, showing how their bodies change shape in response to age and stress. Over time I learned to trigger the process: I pop a jar of polyps in the fridge for two weeks, and after that, they will transform into baby jellies. Now I can re-create experiments I’ve read about in research papers, describing how jellyfish are able to reverse their age back to polyps by reorganising the tissue in their bodies. I don’t have a lot of confidence that I can pull this off, but that’s what I’m trying to capture in images.

In quarantine, when I didn’t have the access to tools or the bandwidth to work on photography, I poured my energy into cooking and gardening. Our household went through at least 200 pounds of flour baking bread; it was a little out of control. And I’d start every day with a book and a cup of tea in the garden, where it’s like you blend into the landscape. I had birds landing on me, and a raccoon walked over my feet.

This has always been the lesson of the garden: If you actually succeed in controlling it to the degree you want to in the beginning, the result is boring, ugly, and clearly contrived. It’s like that in photography.

Hear Varma describe his memorable photo quarry in season three, episode eight, of our podcast, Overheard at National Geographic. Learn more at natgeo.com/overheard.

Read more from this series, “What was it like to be a photographer in 2020?”

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