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WINTER 2016
Z
ena Holloway has evolved into one of the world’s
top commercial underwater photographers in a
circuitous and nontraditional fashion. She did not
live by the sea as a child, and she does not point to
Jacques Cousteau for her inspiration. She grew up in
urban London until the age of eight, when she went
off to boarding school in the countryside for the next
eight years. Not much from those years suggested her
future profession. However, there were the stories her
mother told about her dad. Although he died when
she was young, Holloway grew up hearing about
how he loved scuba diving, and she decided she, too,
should give it a try.
At 16 she enrolled in a diving course, and when she
finished school at 18 she went on a dive holiday to the Red
Sea. That’s when her life’s path took a plunge beneath the
waves. Not ready to return to London at the end of her
vacation, she got a job at a dive center and did odd jobs to
make ends meet. She recalls being quite good at “cleaning
the loo.” One advantage she had was being English where
most of the captains and instructors were Egyptian. This
gave her the language and cultural knowledge to work as a
hostess aboard the daily dive boats.
Holloway’s time in Egypt provided some great dive
experiences, but to make a career of it she needed to
become an instructor. She enrolled in an Instructor
Development Course in Sharm el Sheikh and upon
graduating got a job on Grand Cayman, first at Red Sail
Sports and then at Bob Soto’s Diving, where she became
one of three staff videographers filming the tourists as
they dived.
After three years she decided there was more to
life than producing tourist videos and in 1995 headed
back to London, where the underwater production
IMAGING
SHOOTER
SHOOTER:
ZENA HOLLOWAY
Photos by Zena Holloway; introduction by Stephen Frink
LINDA LAIRD