Description
Jacques Yves Cousteau has said, “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
About the Work
Having worked as a professional underwater photographer for over 45 years, I firmly believe that we are born of the sea and are inextricably connected to it. Even if you stood far inland, on a landlocked plateau, thousands of feet above sea level, all you have to do is look up to the sky (as I did many years ago, when I was filming in Tibet on the Chang Tang Plateau, high in the Himalayas) and there it is in the clouds: water vapor and evidence of the ocean’s life-sustaining moisture evaporated from the sea, which will eventually rain down on Earth, sustaining terrestrial life, and be carried seaward again by streams and rivers. Half of the oxygen on Earth is generated from the sea. Without our oceans, life as we know it would cease to exist. What we do to the sea — and the stewardship we may extend to it — we ultimately do to and for ourselves. It is this truth — this connection — that I strive to make visible through my work using mostly traditional film and darkroom methods, with a strong emphasis on my beloved home waters of Monterey Bay and the Central California coast.
Bio
From the freezing climes of Antarctica and Greenland to the heat and humidity of the Amazon, Chuck Davis has worked as a specialist in marine and underwater photography and cinematography. His motion picture credits include work on numerous IMAX films, including two Academy Award-nominated films, Alaska: Spirit of the Wild and The Living Sea. For over twenty years, Davis worked as a freelance cinematographer and still photographer with the Cousteau filming teams working with the late Jacques Yves Cousteau and his son Jean-Michel aboard vessels Alcyone and Calypso, during production of the Rediscovery of the World TV series and later, as a director of photography on Jean-Michel Cousteau’s, Ocean Adventures PBS television series.
Davis’s still photographs have been published nationally and internationally in magazines such as B+W, LensWork, Silvergrain Classics, ORION, LIFE, Blancpain’s Editions Fifty Fathoms, National Geographic, and French Terre Sauvage. His work has been widely exhibited and included in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections. Davis is the author/photographer of California Reefs (Chronicle Books) and has earned degrees in fisheries biology from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and in filmmaking from the Brooks Institute of Photography. In 2017, Davis was the recipient of the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences’ prestigious NOGI Award for Arts. www.tidalflatsphoto.com
