2017 awards archive
2017 Legend 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.
Emory Kristof
A pioneer of innovative, high-technology underwater photography using robotic cameras and remotely operated vehicles, Emory Kristof began his career with National Geographic as an intern in 1963.
Kristof created preliminary designs for the electronic camera system used by the Argo vehicle that found the Titanic. He led photographic surveys of the CSS Alabama off the coast of France in 1992 and the sixteenth-century wreck San Diego in the Philippines in 1993. In 1995, he led an expedition to recover the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald and produced the first deep-water images using high-definition television.
Kristof’s “Testing the Waters of Rongelap,” published in National Geographic in April 1998, recorded ocean life in the nuclear-weapons-contaminated waters surrounding the Marshall Islands. In August 1998, Kristof’s pictures of the Titanic were presented in the National Geographic article “Tragedy in Three Dimensions.” The pictures, recorded in 1991 using high-intensity lighting systems, appeared in unprecedented detail because of advances in 3-D computer video editing.
Born in 1942, Kristof studied journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park and received his bachelor’s degree in 1964. He served as a National Geographic staff photographer from 1964 to 1994 and produced more than forty articles for the magazine.
Kristof has earned many awards for both writing and photography, including the NOGI Award for Arts from the Underwater Society of America in 1988 and the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Award for Underwater Exploration in 1986. That same year, Kristof and Robert Ballard received the American Society of Magazine Publishers Innovation in Photography Award for their photographic coverage of the Titanic. In 1998, Kristof was presented with the J. Winton Lemen Fellowship Award by the National Press Photographers Association “for being one of our profession’s most imaginative innovators.” In 2001 Kristof was named a contributing photographer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.
Beneath the Sea is proud to name Emory Kristof as its 2017 Legend of the Sea.