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teach in-flight and ground-to-air photography to Army and Air Force personnel. It was soon after this that he met Heinrich Weston, from Santa Barbara, Calif., who convinced him that there needed to be an educational facility to teach photography to the many returning

veterans who needed careers and had the GI Bill to help fund them. On Oct. 17, 1945, they opened the doors to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, dedicated to the pursuit of the art, science and business of photography. They started with 35 students that first year, and

today there are more than 1,200 students enrolled at Brooks. They teach cinematography, filmmaking and scriptwriting in addition to all the commercial and fine art photography classes offered. There are now 8,500 alumni worldwide.

SF// I can’t imagine underwater photography was a natural progression for students at Brooks, yet that program has graduated some of the top shooters in the field. How did that program come to be so successful?

EB// My dad enjoyed snorkeling, but he never really got into scuba or underwater photography. When I joined Brooks Institute as an instructor in 1960, we were already running field trips to Sonora, Mexico, to photograph people and seascapes. The students would snorkel and swim quite actively while there, so it seemed underwater photography would be a natural extension. That first year I took a group of students there and learned how to make and use housings to protect our land cameras against the effects of immersion in the sea. More and more of our students seemed to enjoy making a statement in the underwater world, and in the decades between 1960 and 1980 it absolutely ballooned. David Doubilet took our class when he was

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IMAGING // S H O O T E R

Below: A large aggregation of sea lions in the Channel Islands. Opposite, clockwise from upper left: Sunlight streams through a kelp frond. Spot, a harbor seal well known to Brooks, nestles into kelp at Anacapa Island. Brooks captures a detail of kelp off Santa Barbara Island. Sea lions at Santa Barbara Island mimic the exhalations of scuba divers.