In a quintessential Little Havana house painted mustard yellow and loaded with history, eclectic antiques and luminous large-scale photographs of quizzical landscapes, Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez work, live and love.

''We do it all together,'' del Valle says, a glass of Argentine merlot in hand and an energetic laugh on his lips after almost every sentence.

They've been together since they met in 1970 at Coral Park Senior High, became sweethearts, married and, in 1977, won a National Endowment for the Arts grant. With the money, they packed their belongings into a Dodge Colt and set out to travel the country for six months to take pictures. When the money ran out, they settled in New York City with plans to study photography and launch dual careers.

''We had one camera back then and always fought about who took the good ones,'' Gómez says. But when they realized they always wanted to capture the same images, they simply decided on a ''forever'' joint credit line: Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez and a shared quest ''to learn something, to try to figure out something about the craft,'' del Valle says. ``We like to be surprised and challenged.''

Three decades later, they are known for their photographic studies of the rural landscapes, salt fields and architecture of Yucatán, Mexico -- works residing in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and celebrated in MoMA Highlights Since 1980 as among the museum's ``most important and influential acquisitions since 1980.''

Del Valle and Gómez's latest project, the series Sections of Time, appears in their new monograph, Witness Number Four (Nazraeli Press, $40), and will be exhibited at Chelsea Galleria in Wynwood from Oct. 11 to Nov. 4. The photographs chronicle the transformation -- through acts of man, nature or the simple passage of time -- of dwellings the couple has photographed since the 1990s.

''Photography is about time, space and memory,'' says del Valle, 57, who teaches five photography courses with Gómez, 54, at Florida International University.

Del Valle and Gómez trace their interest in photography back to the moment when their airplanes took off from Havana International Airport. From their window seats, they got their first bird's-eye views of the world.

They left Cuba two months apart, in late 1961. He was 10, traveling with his mother and little sister. She was 8 and with an aunt.

''Now as adults, we both compare our individual experiences leaving Cuba with a photographer's keen sense of curiosity, precision and great attention to detail,'' they write in an essay titled Home Away From Home. ``After all, looking at the world out of an airplane's window is similar to looking at life through the ground glass of a camera -- remarkable, surprising and transforming.''

Their new book -- they've published five monographs -- is a tribute to a heritage not always obvious in their work in Mexico. It features an essay by the late exiled writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as well as contributions from Cuban-American photographers Tony Mendoza and Abelardo Morell.

But heritage has always been closely linked to their photography. They are followers and admirers of the British photographer P.H. Emerson, who was born in Cuba in 1856 -- ''They used to call him Pedrito,'' del Valle quips -- and lived there until he moved to England at 12. Emerson's images are among the first photographs to be considered art.

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