Photographer David Doubilet on His Work

Brian Handwerk
National Geographic News

March 18, 2003

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David Doubilet is one of the world's leading underwater photographers. He has traveled to the Red Sea, Pearl Harbor, the South Pacific, and beyond, capturing groundbreaking images of great white sharks, flashlight fish, shark-repelling flounders, creatures of the undersea desert, fluorescent coral, World War II wrecks, and more.

Born in New York City in 1946, Doubilet began snorkeling off the New Jersey coast when he was eight years old. By the time he was 12, he was scuba diving and taking pictures using a Brownie Hawkeye in a rubber bag as his first underwater camera. He spent his summers diving, taking pictures, and working as a dive guide. Since 1972, he has shot more than 60 stories for National Geographic magazine.

His most recent book, The Great Barrier Reef, was published last year.

Many people consider your job to be one of the greatest in the world; do you?

It's one of the most wonderful jobs in the world, it's certainly not the easiest job in the world. At times it's downright crazy. It's a job that combines the need for exacting detail with a certain amount of strange physical work—swimming underwater. It's not as strenuous as mountain climbing, or bicycling around the world, or trekking through a jungle. It is a combination of paying attention to what you need to make a picture underwater, and the diving itself.

That means when you are there and thinking about all of those things, the scuba diving world kind of becomes second nature. You're just there, you're swimming, and you don't really pay attention to it—but of course you do have to pay attention to your time, your depth, and how you feel.

And then, you leave this world as a trespasser, and go briefly into another. It's a world that's most of our planet, yet we see it only so briefly. We've had people in space for maybe a year and a half I guess, but yet underwater I think the longest that people have been able to stay down there is 30 or 40 days. We're just beginning to assemble an idea of what this most beautiful, most mysterious part of our planet is.

Do you see a conservation aspect to your work?

The problem with any biological entity on our planet, any environment, is that as fast as we discover it we tend to destroy it at the same time. It's as if we can be compared with the conquistadors, who discovered an entire civilization, killed it, and took everything away from it until there was nothing left.

There was a symposium at the University of Georgia a few years ago and I was one of the people who gave a lecture. The lecturer before me dealt with the ethics of the conservation movement. Why are we doing these things? Not just what's good and what's bad—but 'why?'

You can delve into all sorts of ideas: We must preserve a species to preserve the world; we must preserve a species to continue our life on the planet; we must preserve a species simply because we should preserve it. But when you ask 'why?' you get a very strange answer, which I think ultimately is the most important answer—because it is beautiful.

What separates humans from other animals is not just an opposable thumb, not just our ability to create electric trains or build buildings; we have this extraordinary appreciation of beauty. Given the right moments, we also have an extraordinary ability to destroy things. There are a million scientific reasons why we should save a tiger, or a tiger shark, and they are real reasons. But ultimately, the bottom-line reason is because it is beautiful.

The ocean is beautiful. A coral reef may arguably be the most beautiful environment on the face of the planet. It's a place that's flooded with light, yet has the most intense colors of any other environment on the planet. We can't destroy this, we have to hold onto this thing and pay attention.

Does treasuring these places mean visiting them ourselves?

Over-tourism is not as big a danger as over-fishing. If you really think about tourism, it's the largest business in the world and it serves people. Again, it gets back to that question; why do we want to go to all of these places? What is the driving force? Are we conquistadors? I don't think so. We want to go because it's beautiful, it's fascinating, and that's what ecotourism is all about. It's an exercise in being human, being on the planet.

When you set out to photograph marine life, do you have to become an animal behaviorist to take effective photographs?

Traditionally, all of the best nature photographers, in the beginning, had some background as hunters. So they knew where things were. Leonard LaRue knew how to stalk things, he knew what the animals might or might not do. I used to be a spear fisherman for a few years, but I never liked it.

So there is always this idea underwater of hunting and finding and looking and peering. Some people are just naturals at it; others take years and years to learn. But it's a question of asking yourself: Why is this fish here? What is it doing? What is it relating to? And you do this in a world of such ultimate chaos.

Do you use a lot of specialized equipment shooting underwater?

Jennifer Hayes and I work together underwater, developing both the pictures and the ideas. She's a biologist and my partner. We use a lot of off-the-shelf things; we buy them and adapt them.

A lot of what I do is in partnership with Joe Stancampiano; he also works for National Geographic. Joe takes an idea and turns it into an aluminum and plastic reality. It's an art in itself. He's an artist and an inventor and an engineer.

You are part of National Geographic's Contributing Photographer-in-Residence program. What does that program offer you as a photographer?

It gives photographers the ability to go out and develop ideas, and work on stories, and use photography not only as a visual exercise, as a piece of art, but to use photography as a way of convincing, educating, and enlightening people.

If your object is to educate, the only way to make people aware is to make an image that astounds—not amuses—but astounds. If you can elicit a response like 'Hello, look at this. This is amazing. This is extraordinary,' then you've done your job. If you can astound somebody, they immediately begin to develop an interest in the subject.

The second part is that this is also our planet. It's all here. It's an illustration, and it can make people aware of how important things are.

David Doubilet is a participant in the Contributing Photographers-in-Residence program of the National Geographic Society.

Contributing Photographers-in-Residence have produced extraordinary images during their decades of assignments for the National Geographic Society, images that capture the wonders of our planet, in addition to documenting critical issues that we confront in our daily lives. Their work is representative of the outstanding body of photography that has become the trademark of the National Geographic Society.