Underwater Photography should be, when we think of it, nothing but an expression of art done while in a dangerously aggressive medium. When we recall one of strongest images of the '60s - the photographs taken on the moon -  hardly ever do we think of them in artistic terms. They are fulcral documents of the history of humankind, whose value has to be considered contextually. If we show them to someone who hasn't seen them before and fail to tell they were taken on the moon, by a human being, on the first manned lunar landing, they will not represent, to that person, nothing but photos of some strange rocks. Photos taken underwater had, for several years, the same contextual value. Had trips to the moon become vulgar, with thousands of different people taking millions of photographs of the moonscape, by now those photos would have lost some of the contextual value and would have started to be appreciated in artistic terms. That's what is becoming of underwater photography. The contextual value of the photos is being lost as the underwater seascape is visited by more and more divers. There are more and more photographers shooting the same underwater subjects. The need of a different view of those subjects has arisen. There is now the need for an artistic approach; the need to show not the subjects themselves but, somewhat, the way we feel those objects.

(Have you ever stopped to ponder why image and imagination are such similar words.)

When considering photography, one only gains by studying what master photographers had to say or did do. Let's hear from some:



"Photography is not art"

Man Ray 

  "Photograpy is art"

Man Ray


"The photographer's eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimetre...he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action."

Henry Cartier-Bresson



Robert Capa


"Photography has its own possibilities of expression, as it sought to record a feeling for life."

Alfred Stieglitz