Photography in Water Exploration
A Journey Through Time
Before the advent of photography, courageous illustrators accompanied daring voyages across the ocean, capturing the imagination of their audiences. In libraries worldwide, cartographic illustrations depict epic struggles between strange-looking colossal sea monsters and majestic sailing ships, reflecting humanity’s fascination with the unknown depths.
The Dawn of Underwater Imagery
The mid-1900s marked a revolutionary shift in our understanding of the underwater world, thanks to pioneers like Hans and Lotte Hass. Their televised underwater films opened a new window into the ocean’s wonders. This groundbreaking work was further popularized by Jacques Cousteau, whose lens transformed public perception and brought the science of marine exploration into living rooms around the globe.
Expanding Our Vision
Today, satellites capture images of the world’s weather patterns, fish shoals, deep-sea landscapes, and shipping movements from afar. With advancements like the Hubble and Webb telescopes, digital imagery helps us locate even the smallest pockets of water within our solar system and beyond. This relentless pursuit of knowledge continues to fuel our curiosity about water in all its forms.
WOW’s Visual Archive
At WOW, photography serves as a key storyteller in our mission to unravel the beauty and significance of water on this blue planet. Our photographic archive includes some of the earliest processed photographs, early lantern slide shows, the Rudolf Kemp Collection, over 100 years of postcards, and a large “Picture Post” library from the mid 1900’s.
Digital Imagery
Our collection also includes NFT’s and other digital artworks including early 1980’s artworks created by pioneers like Jonathan Inglis using ‘Paintbox’ – Quantel’s computer graphics workstation which changed the way images were created and adapted for all time, giving rise to the dawn of speech-to-image, photo-to-story, text-to-video and speech-to-video AI generations.
Equipment
Alongside our library of drawn, photographed, printed, painted and computer generated images, our Collections include the very items of technology used to produce them.
These include mapping pens, boxwood engraved print blocks, litho plates, letterpress characters, photo-retouch inks, batik wax cups, silk screen printer along with the first Canon Digital Camera, a decorative Bell & Howell ‘Filmo 75 Motion Picture Camera’ (seen below) of the early 1900’s and the Bolex film cameras first used in the early days of the Paris animation industry.
Inspiring Good Stewardship Through Imagery:
“By collecting and using images and objects to inspire, fascinate and educate visitors, WOW aims to culture a deeper appreciation of the many roles water has on Earth, promoting the good stewardship of water habitats and water itself.” (Joyce L.Elam 1978)
Further Reading:
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