Before Photography

Before the advent of photography, courageous illustrators accompanied daring voyages across the ocean – their art capturing the imagination of the audience. In libraries worldwide, cartographic illustrations depict epic struggles between strange-looking colossal sea monsters and majestic sailing ships, magnifying 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 an ‘in depth‘ window into the ocean’s wonders.

This groundbreaking work was furthered by Jacques Cousteau, whose lens transformed public perception and placed the science of marine exploration into living room televisions around the World.

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, Webb and Nancy Grace Roman Space telescopes, digital imagery will help us to locate ever more pockets of water within our solar system and fuel our curiosity to explore other galaxies.

WOW’s Visual Archive

As photography serves as a key storyteller in our mission to unravel the beauty and significance of water on this blue planet, WOW holds an image library including: early processed photographs, lantern slides, the Rudolf Kemp Collection, postcards, prints, paintings, illustrations, ‘Picture Post’ library [mid 1900’s], the Newman Mowbray Books Collection.

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.

(Above) Speech-to-Image AI generation. 2023 (WOW Library)

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, lithographic 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

“Our WOW Collection contains images and artifacts to inspire, fascinate and educate. Each object holds a water story that when told, reveals one of the many roles water has on Earth. Through telling the stories our aim is to promote the good stewardship of water habitats and water itself.”    (WOW Founder. Joyce L.Elam 1922 – 2013)

Doors into the Next Layer of the Story

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