Laguna La Ventanilla sits just behind the beach, a short way west of Mazunte on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. I photographed there from a boat on the lagoon and from the shore, and I came home with four wildlife images I keep returning to: a Mesoamerican slider surfacing through green water, a kingfisher on a bare branch, a crocodile that is mostly hidden below the surface, and a long-necked anhinga standing above the dark lagoon.
I go to places like this looking for animals. That is the honest starting point. But the frames from Ventanilla that stayed with me are the ones where the animal became part of something larger: a pattern of reflections, a field of colour, a texture that keeps holding your attention after you've worked out what you are looking at.
This is a story about that shift, from observing wildlife to noticing the picture the lagoon was already making.
A lagoon at the edge of the Pacific
La Ventanilla belongs to the municipality of Santa María Tonameca. The lagoon forms where the Tonameca River meets the coast, and for much of the year a bar of sand separates it from the open ocean. Mangroves line its channels, mostly white mangrove with stands of red mangrove, and the water beneath them reads dark from a boat. Accounts of the lagoon attribute part of that darkness to tannins from the mangrove roots.
The beach on the other side of the sand is a different world: dark sand, heavy surf and open sea. Its name comes from a rock formation there. Ventanilla means "little window", and a rocky outcrop on the beach has an opening through it that frames the horizon. You can see it from the shore.
I like that a place named for a window turned out to be a place about looking. Through the rock you see the Pacific. On the lagoon side, the window is the water itself.
A community that chose to protect the lagoon
The calm of Ventanilla today is the result of decisions people made. Before ecotourism, families here lived from fishing and farming, and from taking sea turtles and crocodile skins. After Mexico banned the capture of sea turtles in 1990, a group of local residents formed an ecotourism cooperative in the mid-1990s and began offering boat tours through the lagoon and its mangroves. Over the years, the community has incubated crocodile eggs and released the young under a registered wildlife management unit, and a 2026 report describes it protecting more than 300 crocodiles.
The mangroves have needed protecting too. Hurricane Pauline damaged the area heavily in 1997, and in 2012 Hurricane Carlotta destroyed much of the mangrove forest around the lagoon. Local cooperatives have since replanted mangroves from community nurseries, including a red-mangrove restoration project led by the Lagarto Real cooperative with the Fondo Oaxaqueño para la Conservación de la Naturaleza.
None of that is visible in a single photograph. It is, though, the reason the animals in these photographs were there to be seen.
From the boat and from the shore
I worked from two vantage points at Ventanilla: from a boat moving slowly through the channels and from the edge of the lagoon on foot. Each gives you a different relationship with the water. On the boat you sit low and close to the surface, so reflections fill more of the frame. From the shore you have solid ground and more time to wait, but the animals decide how close the picture can be.
I'm not going to pretend these four photographs happened in a neat sequence. They didn't come to me as a story with a beginning and an end. What connects them is the way the lagoon kept turning a wildlife sighting into something closer to a painting.
Four photographs from Laguna Ventanilla
Untitled (Painted Turtle): when the water starts to paint
At first glance, this one is simple: a turtle rising through the surface of still water. The turtle is a Mesoamerican slider (Trachemys venusta). Its shell sits just above the waterline and its head rests at the surface, so the eyes and the yellow markings on its face meet their own reflection.
What happened next was in the water rather than the animal. The reflections pulled everything into something more painterly. Bare branches crossing the frame dissolve into loose lines below the surface. Greens and blues break into soft patches of colour, and the thin skin of the water behaves like a brushstroke.
I'm drawn to the edge where a photograph stops behaving like a document and starts behaving like a painting, or a graphic. This image sits right on that edge. You can read it as a turtle in a lagoon, or as an abstract pattern of colour and line, and it changes a little depending on which way you choose to read it.
A note on the title. Originally identified as a painted turtle, the subject of this photograph is now understood to be a Mesoamerican slider (Trachemys venusta), photographed at Laguna Ventanilla in Oaxaca, Mexico. The original artwork title has been retained as part of the photograph's story.
The kingfisher: a still point in moving leaves
The kingfisher is a male Ringed Kingfisher, with blue-grey upperparts, a clean white collar and rusty underparts. It perched at the tip of a bare, angled branch with a wall of sunlit mangrove leaves behind it.
What makes the frame work for me is the contrast between the one hard line and everything soft around it. The branch rises diagonally through the picture and carries your eye straight to the bird. Behind it, the foliage falls out of focus into overlapping shapes of light and shadow, almost a textile. The bird is the only crisp, still thing in a frame full of movement.
The crocodile: almost entirely reflection
Most of this photograph is water. The American crocodile is the crocodile species of this coast, and here only its eye ridges, the top of its head and a line of armoured scutes break the surface. The rest is underneath, implied.
Above it, the reflections of trunks along the bank drop into the lagoon as dark vertical bands, and the surface shifts between deep green and near black. I find the restraint in this image more powerful than a full view of the animal would be. The crocodile is present, but the picture is really about the surface it is hiding beneath: texture against smoothness, a horizontal form against vertical reflections.
The anhinga: a line above the dark water
The long-necked bird is an Anhinga, and its pale tan neck and breast suggest a female or an immature bird. It stood on a dark, rough stump rising out of the lagoon, neck drawn up into a long curve, bill pointed toward the light.
Light caught the neck and chest while the background fell almost entirely into shadow, with just a band of green reflection at one edge and a scatter of soft highlights behind. In practice, that leaves one elegant line, one block of texture beneath it, and a great deal of quiet dark space. Of the four photographs, this is the one that feels closest to a classical portrait.
When observation becomes composition
Looking back at these images together, I can see the lagoon teaching the same lesson four times. The animal gets you to raise the camera. What makes the photograph worth living with is everything around it: the way a reflection doubles a line, the way out-of-focus leaves become colour, the way dark water gives a single form space to breathe.
That is what I mean by looking closer. It isn't a matter of getting physically nearer, because at Ventanilla you often can't, and shouldn't. It means staying with a scene long enough for its shapes to become clearer than its subject.
It is also why I think of these as wall pieces rather than records of a trip. A good fine-art photograph keeps giving after the first look. You walk past it on an ordinary morning and notice a line in the water you hadn't seen before.
Visiting Laguna Ventanilla with care
If you go, book a tour with one of the local cooperatives that run boats on the lagoon. The tours are the community's livelihood, and they fund the protection that makes the place what it is. Swimming in the lagoon is not recommended because crocodiles live there, so watch from the boat or the bank and keep a respectful distance. A long lens lets you photograph without changing what the animals are doing, which is the whole point of being there.
For another lagoon on this coast, see my behind-the-scenes morning at Laguna Manialtepec. Further east, in Huatulco, a quieter encounter became Twin Motmots.
Further along the Oaxaca coast, see Golden Cheek: a rooftop woodpecker encounter in Huatulco.
Bringing the lagoon home
Untitled (Painted Turtle) is the photograph from Ventanilla that I feel belongs on a wall. As an acrylic glass print, the greens deepen and the reflections take on real depth, which suits it as a statement piece. It is also available on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 fine-art paper for collectors, and as a gallery-wrapped canvas for a softer, matte presence in a living room or bedroom. If you are deciding between finishes, my guide to acrylic versus canvas prints walks through the differences.
You can see the full Mexican Fine Art Series here.
