Artist Statement: For nearly 30 years, Steve Eilenberg and Marie Tartar have delighted in the ocean’s abundance and endeavored to share its bounty and vulnerability with others through their photography. Through travels far and wide, they have photographed creatures great and small, both wonderful and weird, in diverse underwater environments, ranging from warm tropical coral reefs to frigid and dark green waters. Inner Space presents a selection of recent work, including their foray in the past year into black water diving, where larval denizens of the ocean’s depths migrate en mass towards the ocean’s surface at night to feed.
Working together as Aperture Photo Arts, Steve and Marie’s photographic works have been displayed in a variety of venues, both together and separately, including La Jolla Athenaeum, San Diego Natural History Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, Birch Aquarium and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Steve's photographic work incorporating medical imaging devices (radiography and CAT scans) has been exhibited at the New-York Historical Society, Mingei International Museum, the San Diego Museum of Man, Jett Gallery and in a Museum of Photographic Arts show, Hidden Worlds. Steve was also represented at the San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park in an exhibition called Beyond the Age of Reason. Marie’s underwater work was featured in a 2-artist exhibition at The Photographer’s Eye Gallery in Escondido, CA in 2020 in a show entitled The Tonic of Wildness. Steve and Marie contributed articles to an online magazine, Photofocus, from 2017-2020. Their photographic work and blogs can be found at www.aperturephotoarts.com.