Step Inside the Secret Florida Keys with a New Photo Book

When he was eighteen years old, photographer Ian Wilson-Navarro’s father took him to visit Dry Tortugas National Park in the Florida Keys, a one-hundred-square-mile refuge accessible only by boat or seaplane. The park’s seven islands and the bountiful waters between them provide a home and migratory stopover for a stunning array of birds, fish, coral, and other marine life. “Even then I was blown away by this place, with its crystal-clear waters, floating in the Gulf,” Wilson-Navarro remembers. Five years later, the Keys native applied for an artist residency program that would allow him to stay on Loggerhead Key and document Dry Tortugas. Now, the book that resulted from that project—and of Wilson-Navarro’s subsequent trips to the park—is out.

Dry Tortugas: Stronghold of Nature includes some two hundred photos of landscapes and wildlife accompanied by essays documenting the area’s history and ecology. “I just welcomed whatever each day brought,” Wilson-Navarro says. He puttered around in an eleven-foot inflatable boat, free-dove the reefs with his camera, and walked the beaches and dunes of the islands. In the process, “I discovered what the Keys are meant to look like,” he says. “In its remoteness and because the majority of the national park is completely protected from commercial and recreational fishing practices, there was an incredible, unspoiled abundance.” 

In a time when Southern biodiversity faces ever more threats, the book documents an increasingly rare bounty, one that includes perching osprey, hatching sea turtle nests, and crabs scuttling across the ocean floor. But over the years he photographed Dry Tortugas, the effects of climate change and pollution touched even this last bastion of marine life. During Wilson-Navarro’s initial residency in 2021, for example, he photographed a shipwreck called the Windjammer that was full of life and covered in thriving, gigantic brain coral. Just a year later, he returned to keep photographing, to find the reefs devastated. “The coral looked like Medusa had turned them all to stone,” he remembers. “It was heart-wrenching.”

Beyond introducing people to the place he loves, he hopes to inspire the book’s readers to closely observe the places they hold dear. “This is my love letter to the Keys,” he says. “If you’re not looking, you might miss something before it’s gone.”

 Below, go behind the scenes of eight images from the book. 

Wilson-Navarro shot Fort Jefferson—a coastal fortress built over three decades, starting in 1846—from a seaplane. It would be used by Union warships to blockade Southern ships, and as a prison for Union deserters. Dry Tortugas National Park as a whole contains some three hundred shipwrecks, pieces of human history that now provide habitat for fish and other sea life. 

“We spent so many nights just lost under a haze of stars,” Wilson-Navarro says. This is the view of the Milky Way from his front porch on Loggerhead Key. Wilson-Navarro snapped the photo with a thirty-second exposure as his residence partner walked the path to the lighthouse with his headlamp. “I wanted to bring in some dynamic light into the foreground,” he says, “and represent someone walking under the starlight.” 

The waters around Loggerhead Key were full of pilchards and baitfish, drawing in birds for the hunt. While conducting a sea turtle survey, Wilson-Navarro came around the corner and saw this resident osprey framed perfectly against the fort and the lighthouse. “I was so grateful for this shot,” he says. “It felt like the bird was posing for me.”

On a reef off Loggerhead Key, a sergeant major swims over a brain coral. Mesmerized by the swirling, maze-like patterns of the coral, Wilson-Navarro snapped the photo while free diving. He never dreamed that when he returned just one year later, the same reef would be stricken by disease. “Seeing that dramatic change happen so quickly hit me hard,” he says. “It makes me feel so lucky to have documented some of these amazing life-forms before they are gone.” 

Wilson-Navarro captured this portrait of a blue crab on a tidal sandbar, where it popped out of the sand right in front of him as he swam. “Besides the beautiful colors in their claws, blue crabs have so much personality,” he says. “I floated alongside this one, waiting for the right angle. It started coming after me in this moment, and that’s when I got the shot.”

Inspired by a similar shot by fellow Florida photographer Carlton Ward, Wilson-Navarro wanted to create the perfect over-under image, achieved by a dome in the camera’s water housing. “That sphere displaces the water so that if you line it up correctly on a calm day, both above and below the water are visible,” Wilson-Navarro explains. He chose a combination of reef and lighthouse to celebrate how Dry Tortugas offers reefs so close to the beach. 

Wilson-Navarro was there to witness a green sea turtle boil—the term for how the hatchlings rise from their nest of sand—and followed the vulnerable reptiles into the water. There, a wall of predators awaited them. “You can tell that these fish know they’re coming, and as the turtles were eaten right in front of my eyes, it made me so deeply appreciate their place in the food chain and the difficulty of their journey.”

On a bright, sunny day, Wilson-Navarro dove alongside a ball of Atlantic thread herring, commonly called pilchards, swirling in the largest school he’d ever seen. “Everything was feeding on this ball of fish—sharks, grouper, tarpon, birds,” he says. “I used a slow shutter speed and just wanted to capture them in their motion and beautiful synchronization.” 

Excerpted from Dry Tortugas: Stronghold of Nature. Photography © 2024 Ian Wilson-Navarro. Reproduced with permission from University Press of Florida. All rights reserved.

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