Passengers on the whale-watcher American Princess, a ninety-five-foot tour boat out of Rockaway, met up with a humpback whale known as NYC0004 on a calm and pleasant Wednesday not long ago. They had been sitting, watching, talking, buying snacks, occasionally feeling seasick, tending to crying babies, and dozing from Dramamine about two miles off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Then the osprey-eyed captain, Tom Paladino, announced that he saw a spout two miles away. As he motored toward it, NYC0004 popped up beside the starboard rail. A dozen pointing arms shot out as if the whale had pulled their strings, and voices shouted, young and old. The whale went under. The boat idled, minutes passed. From his vantage in the wheelhouse, the captain saw a watery sign and told everybody to look in the direction of an apartment building silhouetted in Atlantic Highlands. Everybody looked. A second later, NYC0004 rose from the deep with white water cascading off its broad gray back.

Everybody cried out with a transported, almost religious sound. In the bow, Artie Raslich, a photographer from East Rockaway, bore down wordlessly. His camera went Click. Click. Click. Click. He would like to own an expensive camera that goes Cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl-cl and takes dozens of shots at the touch of a button, but he can’t afford it. He’s a freelancer, scrapping hard for the sales and commissions he gets. NYC0004 submerged again, leaving a whale-shaped patch of flat, soft-looking water on the rippled sea. Wilson’s storm petrels, small black-and-white pelagic birds often seen in the presence of whales, skimmed back and forth where the whale had been.

A year ago, Raslich took the most famous photo of a whale in New York City. It shows a humpback breaching skyward almost exactly in line with the Empire State Building, which seems to extend its profile. Raslich is a stocky, pyramid-shaped man, the better to support a camera, and his eyes are tropical-sea green. When he’s working, they become electric and jump around. Now NYC0004 surfaced on one side of the boat, then ahead of it, then behind. It spouted, rolled, flapped a surfboard-size fin in the air, and sounded with flukes raised before they smacked the water and disappeared. Raslich was on top of each move, clicking away.

When the boat finally headed back to port, he unwound with colleagues from Gotham Whale, a nonprofit organization that keeps track of whales in New York waters. Among other tasks, Gotham Whale catalogues individual animals by number, based mostly on fluke markings; it gave NYC0004 its unsentimental name. As the organization’s head of social media and its main photographer, Raslich knows the whales personally. Still keyed up from the shoot, he was talking a nautical mile a minute. “When the whales are in town, summer through fall, I’m out here doing this every day, if I don’t have another job,” he said. “Either I’m on this boat or on my own twenty-six-foot Formula out in East Rockaway. Each good photo is the result of I don’t know how many thousands of hours on the water.”

Catherine Granton, Gotham Whale’s marine educator, added, “We post on our Web site a lot of pictures of whales next to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or with the city skyline in the background. Everybody’s reaction was ‘Ho-hum,’ until that Empire State Building shot. Soon it was everywhere on the Web.”

“I had taken thousands of shots of that particular whale,” Raslich went on. “He’s easy to identify, because he’s got a line of healed cuts from a ship’s propeller on his right side. His official I.D. is NYC0011, but I named him Jerry, after Jerry Garcia, and that’s what everybody calls him. I’m a Deadhead. I’ve been to a hundred and sixty-eight Grateful Dead concerts, not including ones where fewer than all the band members were present. The day I took the picture, I was in my boat off Far Rockaway. I had lined myself up with the Empire State and the Citibank building; I hoped Jerry would surface in between them. The Dead were on my boat stereo cranked up loud, and that must’ve been why I didn’t hear him. Suddenly, I looked to my right and he was four feet away. He probably heard the music and wanted to see what was going on. I saw this huge eye looking at me, and there was a disgusting smell of decomposing fish. Then he submerged, and a few seconds later, just in front of my boat, he spy-hopped—went straight up, all the way out of the water, to take a look around—and the building was there in the evening light, and it all came together, every element in place, tack-sharp.” ♦