Sea in the City

This summer, Chistoprudny Bulvar will be transformed into a haven of underwater tranquility. David Doubilet, one of the world's top underwater photographers, is displaying 100 of his works in an outdoor exhibition that opens Saturday.

"It will be enormous fun to bring the sea to Moscow," Doubilet said in an e-mail interview this week. "I want to take people to distant, hidden corners in our seas and show them the strange and beautiful creatures that share our planet with us."

Doubilet is a contributor to magazines across the world, including National Geographic Magazine, where he is contributing photographer-in-residence, and he has written seven books on the sea. He is a member of the Royal Photographic Society and the International Diving Hall of Fame.

The exhibition, organized by Afisha-Mir magazine, is the photographer's first in Moscow, and the works will be on display around the clock and open to the public free of charge. Doubilet said he was excited that people would have the opportunity "to walk through and ponder without the constraint of opening hours and access."

Born in New York in 1946, Doubilet said he became interested in the sea at an early age. "I was horrible at field sports because of asthma, but I could swim like crazy without any problems," he said. At the age of 12, his father helped him to make an underwater camera housing out of a rubber anesthesiologist's bag, which he used to make "truly bad images of fish."

His interest grew, and eventually he couldn't conceive of doing anything else. "I spent all of my free time in the sea looking for creatures to take pictures of, and finally it evolved into a career."

David Doubilet

Doubilet still has the same fascination for the underwater world that first captivated him in his youth. "Absolutely everything excites me," he said. "The smallest shrimp and the largest whaleshark and everything in between. There are layers and layers of life that just keep exposing themselves if you look hard enough."

The underwater world captured in his photographs seems a million miles from Moscow's traffic-choked streets: the blues, the greens of the seemingly boundless space and freedom of nature. "I like to think that I help take people to places they cannot go. I like to work with light and time to create dreamlike images that may linger in someone's mind for a time."

Doubilet said he hopes his work brings attention not only to the sea's beauty, but also to the threats to it. "If I can make viewers notice the sea, then maybe I can make them care about our fragile sea and what lives there. Perhaps as photographers we can inspire a new generation of Jacques Cousteau's or Sylvia Earle's that can bring solutions to our long list of marine problems."

The photographs on display cover a huge range of creatures, from tiny, almost invisible creatures to big predators: Stingray, turtles, jellyfish, sharks and clownfish are depicted against the breathtaking colors of sea and sky. The exhibition also includes a few black-and-white shots, a medium that Doubilet said he particularly loves working in.

Some of the most stunning shots are those taken with a half-submerged camera, giving a beautiful image of the underwater world against the background of the shore and sky. "I am especially fond of half-and-half images," Doubilet said. "I wanted to show people that wonderful moment of sea and surface. What it is like to look at two worlds through one lens."

"Podvodny Mir," or "Underwater World," runs from Saturday to Aug. 31 on Chistoprudny Bulvar.