2013 awards archive
2013 Legends of the Sea
Beneath the Sea’s Legend of the Sea Program recognizes a vision, the drive to follow it, and a dedication to purpose. Its expression may be calculated, well-reasoned wisdom; it may involve plain and simple luck; or it may demand exceptional courage in challenges that today seem ordinary but were once new, mysterious, and untouched.
Valerie and Ron Taylor
Legends of the Sea reflect personal vision and drive, smarts, seized opportunity, luck and character. Legends of the Sea do not regard themselves as such. Past recipients are gracious people, talented, enthusiastic, focused, and driven. And they have the ability to present complicated ideas simply so that others may grasp them.
Since their beginning as skin divers and spear fishers in 1956, for the past fifty years Ron and Valerie Taylor spent their life and career underwater. By 1962 they had taken up underwater photography. In 1963 they sold their first production, Shark Hunters, to Australian and American Television. That was also the year they married.
Ron’s underwater camera designs helped them film startling interactive events with underwater life. Valerie’s grace and charm in front of the lens was complimented by her perceptions of the pressures put on the ocean’s resources by a growing population worldwide and a burgeoning fishing industry.
The change of perspective in their body of work mirrors these changes in the oceans. Their perception of the animals underwater, especially sharks, changed their understanding of these predators and became the drive for the conservation and preservation we have today.
Along the way both Ron and Valerie collected prizes to match their skill, perception, and ability to communicate with a viewing audience. Valerie’s conservation activism produced laws that changed the way industry dealt with life in the ocean and with those laws came recognition for her effort.
With those international prizes and awards came an international reputation that led to the choice assignments of their times: Blue Water, White Death, the live shark sequences found in Jaws, Orca, The Blue Lagoon, the TV series Wild, Wild World of Animals, a Walt Disney production The Rescue, Return to the Blue Lagoon, and Honeymoon in Vegas, the live tiger shark sequences for The Island of Doctor Moreau, and they co-produced Mysteries of the Jungle Sea.
When not on a movie location shoot or somewhere in the world collecting an award for their films or activities, then Ron and Valerie could be found in their native Australia cobbling together their own productions: Taylor’s Inner Space, Shark Hunters, The Wreck of the Yongala, Shark Pod, and Ron’s on-going saga, A Lifetime with Sharks. Two movies were made of their lives, Sea Lovers and In the Realm of the Shark. They also appeared in three one-hour specials about their lives called Shadow of the Shark.
In 1969 Valerie picked up a still camera, Ron built a housing for it, and the underwater world gained a photographer with the eye of an artist. In 1973 she was published in National Geographic, including having her picture on the cover holding the camera, housing, and macro attachments Ron had built for her. In the years following, Valerie’s pictures appeared throughout the world in top magazines including Stern and Life. Valerie and Ron have contributed photographs to help illustrate several of the Cousteau series of books.
Along with her photographic skills, Valerie is an accomplished artist, but because of her commitments in diving, she has only begun actively painting in recent years. Her art is much in demand both for its beauty and accuracy of detail. At this juncture, she and Ron have successfully published several books filled with their photography. Presently she is writing another children’s book, even as demand for her paintings grows throughout the world.
In 2000 Valerie was one of the inaugural inductees in the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
In addition to their many other honors, Valerie and Ron Taylor were celebrated as Divers of the Year at Beneath the Sea in 2007.
Sadly, Ron recently passed away on September 9, 2012. His passing was noted internationally throughout the world of diving and in the general international media. Valerie continues to soldier-on carrying the torch of ocean conservation throughout the world.
