Undersea Photographers Share their Stories of Underwater Adventure at the Barclay.
Underwater photographers David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes met underwater photographing a pregnant lemon shark giving birth in the Bahamas.
Throughout their many years of underwater adventure, this husband and wife team have swum with beluga whales, photographed sleeping sharks and explored life beneath the polar ice.
This month, they’ll share behind-the-scenes stories from their life-changing assignments as part of the National Geographic Live series at Irvine Barclay Theatre.
Since his first assignment for National Geographic in 1971 (shooting garden eels in the Red Sea), Doubilet has written 70 stories for the magazine and has spent more of his life underwater than on dry land—a habit he acquired when he was eight years old at a summer camp in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
“I put on a mask, I went beneath the water in a tiny little lake, and my life changed,” Doubilet remembers. “I saw shafts of green light with small fish swimming through… I still remember it to this day.”
At 12 years of age, he was snorkeling in Elberon, New Jersey, with his Brownie Hawkeye camera wrapped in a rubber anesthesiologist’s bag that his physician father had given him.
Like Doubilet, Hayes’ fascination with the underwater world began early in life.
Growing up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, Hayes played in the pond her father had built, watched Jacques Cousteau on Sunday mornings and dreamt of the ocean.
“I was obsessed with everything underwater…everything from streams to ponds to lakes,” she recalls.
An aquatic biologist, Hayes has spent 11,000 hours underwater documenting the beauty hidden beneath the surface.
Passionate and endowed with endless curiosity, Doubilet and Hayes have had an underwater love affair with the mystifying world beneath the sea. “It’s a world,” says Doubilet, “more alien than the edge of space.”