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Water Light Time by David Doubilet
Water Light Time by David Doubilet
Underwater photographers! Sell your equipment at the next car boot sale, trash your trannies and burn your negatives! You will never take a photograph as good as any in David Doubilet's latest book, Water Light Time. Save yourselves the anguish of defective O-rings, flooded cameras, and all that precious underwater time spent hanging round waiting for the blind miner-shrimp to make an appearance. Get down to the bookshop instead.
Am I over-reacting? Hold a copy of this exquisitely produced tome in your hands, peruse the pages, some reproduced in four-colour black and white (no, that's not a contradiction in terms) and make up your own mind.
David Doubilet is 52 and has concentrated on being a top underwater wildlife photographer since he left school. He has contributed to National Geographic since 1972. Practice makes perfect and this collection of shots represents the acme of his achievement to date.
What are you interested in? Long-nosed hawkfish? Galapagos sea-lions? Pacific mantas? Whale sharks? Jellyfish? Octopus? Turtles? Anemonefish? Corals? Sea-horses? They're all there. Would-be exponents of the underwater photographer's art - look and weep!
Of the half-million underwater photographs I've made, I have enough of this standard to fill a pamphlet. Water Light Time is a 5cm-thick coffee-table volume with nothing but glorious image after image. Text is relegated to tight descriptions printed so minutely that anyone over 25 will need a magnifying glass to read it.
Some photographs will be familiar, others not. But if the subjects sound predictable, Doubilet's unique interpretation always transcends ordinariness.
Water Light Time is a celebration of why we go diving. I'm surprised that Kodak and Fuji have not suppressed its publication - they make fortunes from the millions of photographs optimistically exposed each year. This book doesn't encourage us by showing what's possible for the underwater photographer - it simply reveals how far we have to go. John Bantin |
| Water Light Time by David Doubilet, Phaidon Press (0171 843 1000). Hardback, 224p, £29.95 |
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