10
|
FALL 2014
FROM THE SAFETY STOP
//
P U B L I S H E R ’ S N O T E
I
embarked on a long overdue task recently: cleaning
out my storage shed. Along with boxes of old paper
records stored far beyond Internal Revenue Service
obligations to do so, I found some vintage dive
magazines. Many were cutting edge for their time
and were instrumental in growing the sport of recreational
scuba to where it is today. My old Skin Diver magazines
made me particularly nostalgic because I worked for that
publication as a freelance photojournalist for 17 years
in the 1980s and ’90s. One cover photo from December
1980 spoke volumes about how far we have come in our
awareness of marine conservation and the role of the
marine photographer in the realm of visual communication.
The cover photograph was a beautiful bikini-clad dive
model gently sitting on the edge of an orange elephant
ear sponge, wonderfully lit and technically excellent. But
sitting on a sponge? Today a responsible magazine would
never publish such an image, and if it did its readers
would quickly and rightly castigate it. Even though it
wasn’t my shot, it could have been, given the ethics of the
time. If I dug deep enough into my old three-ring binders
of slides I’m sure I would find pictures I took of divers in
contact with coral or sponges or perhaps holding turtles,
puffing pufferfish or riding manta rays — things we now
know we should never do again.
Our attitude in those days can be attributed to more
than just ignorance or arrogance. We believed the
sea was an inexhaustible resource of wonder — self-
replenishing and never-ending. In this issue, Jerry
Greenberg reminisces about his early days photographing
the reefs of Key Largo, Fla. — in particular his work
in the January 1962 issue of National Geographic on
America’s first undersea park (see Page 19). In the
context of the Coral Restoration Foundation’s good work
replenishing our coral reefs with transplanted coral, I
was eager for Greenberg to weigh in on how things used
to be. Some of his most iconic images were taken in
immense fields of elkhorn and staghorn coral off South
Carysfort Reef at the far north end of what was then John
Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park.
Even though I did not move to Key Largo until 1978,
I saw these vast panoramas of branching corals, and
they probably didn’t look too different from what
Greenberg saw two decades before. Carysfort was a
long trip to the north for many of the local dive boats,
and when I did occasionally get up there with my leaky
Nikonos II camera and Seacor 21mm lens, I never
brought home significant images. But I wasn’t worried;
I could always go back, or so I thought.
I never imagined that the annoying black-spined sea
urchins (Diadema antillarum) that poked through the
knees of my wetsuit during night dives would suffer
mass mortality throughout much of the Caribbean and
tropical Atlantic in 1983. And I was not aware that
Visual
Responsibility
B Y S T E P H E N F R I N K
STEPHEN FRINK
STEPHEN FRINK
