David Doubilet

By: Written and Photographed by David Doubilet | October 06, 2008 | Local Travel

Sixty years ago, Malibuites would stare out into the Pacific and see only the surface. What happened beneath the skin of the sea was out of sight and out of mind. Even the Hollywood vision of the sea was limited to Esther Williams’ water ballets or south-sea “natives” battling a giant mechanical octopus photographed in a studio soundstage tank somewhere in Burbank. Two simple inventions, the facemask and aqualung, opened the secret widows into the sea. The ability to actually swim and breath underwater gave photographers precious time to make pictures.

It is imagery that peels back the layers of the sea, exposing a world where light behaves very differently than in air, where creatures and colors exist in a very real world that was unimaginable a half-century ago.

I began making pictures underwater in the green waters of the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast when I was 12. I made a makeshift underwater camera by putting a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera into an anesthesiologist bag attached to a facemask. My first work was abstract to say the least: A fish almost looked like a fish. It was however, the beginning of a career in underwater photography for National Geographic. Even now, after thousands and thousands of hours in the sea, my partner, Jennifer Hayes, and I enter the sea with a sense of respectful trespass and great anticipation.

For me, underwater photography is the best profession in the world. It is also the only job I could imagine doing since grade school. I would have been a disastrous pilot, accountant, lawyer, doctor or baker. Working in the sea is a visual gift that I never take for granted. We have seen great whites materialize out of the blue, squadrons of manta rays feeding at night, and mating congregations of a hundred thousand green sea turtles. We have followed the path of the war in the Pacific, photographing the wreckage and silent memories.

Every day is not just another assignment; it is a small, but contained voyage of discovery. But for all the joy there is a sense of ever-present doom. Humans have approached the ocean as conquistadors, and what we have discovered we have destroyed through over-fishing and destruction of habitat. The only difference is that we have not tried to convert the fish to Catholicism. And of course climate change and global warming is all about water. The rising sea level and elevated temperatures that directly affect the polar regions are only part of the problem. The vast amounts of carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans have changed the chemistry of the ocean making it difficult for reef-building organisms to survive. Sadly, scientists predict that coral reefs may only be a memory by mid-century.

Strangely, the most important images of our oceans were not made underwater. They are the pictures of earth from space. These images put our world into true perspective. I cannot think of a better set of words than to quote our friend and colleague in the sea, Sylvia Earle: “Planet Earth should really be called Planet Ocean.”

David Doubilet

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