2025 Legend of the Sea

David Doubilet was born and raised in New York City. His father was a physician who became a professor of surgery at New York University. At age eight, David, an asthmatic child who at first had little interest in the outdoors, discovered the joy of underwater exploration while attending summer camp on a freshwater lake in the Adirondack Mountains. Growing up in New York City, he had fewer opportunities to explore his passion during the year, but his family spent summers at their seaside home in Elberon, New Jersey, where he took up snorkeling. At age twelve, he began taking pictures above and below the water, wrapping his camera in a plastic anesthesiologist’s bag given to him by his physician father. His father encouraged him in other ways, taking him along on a fishing trip to Andros Island in the Bahamas, where David learned to dive with scuba gear. In his teens, David began working at the island’s Small Hope Lodge and would return every summer through his college years as a diving instructor, taking undersea pictures in his spare time. Back on the mainland, he worked part-time as a diver and photographer for the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory. He entertained thoughts of becoming a marine biologist, but when he entered Boston University in autumn 1965, he soon gravitated toward film and broadcasting studies. Over the summer following freshman year, he attended a pilot course in underwater photography at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. Bored with his first efforts at motion photography, by the time he graduated in 1970, David Doubilet was firmly set on a career as a still photographer.

The following year, Doubilet traveled to Israel, where he photographed the garden eels of the Red Sea. The resulting photographs were published in National Geographic in 1972. It was the beginning of a relationship that has lasted over forty years. In 1976, he became a contract photographer for the magazine. His work appears in its pages multiple times each year, carrying his byline as photographer and, in recent years, as the author of the articles. He has to date published more than eighty stories for National Geographic magazine. David has been a Rolex Testimonee since 1994. He has returned many times to the Red Sea, a location he calls his “favorite underwater studio,” producing nearly a dozen stories. His adventures in the warm-water zones have taken him to Indonesia, Micronesia, Australia, and New Guinea in the Pacific, as well as Sri Lanka and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. He has also documented cold-temperature ecosystems and both polar regions. Besides photographing the living creatures of the world’s waters—crocodiles, alligators, stingrays, sharks, and barracuda—he has pursued his love of history, uncovering the wrecks of ships and planes at the ocean’s bottom, including the USS Arizona in its resting place at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Apart from his magazine work, he served as the still photographer for the feature films The Deep and Splash. In 1989, Doubilet published his first book, Light in the Sea. His book Pacific: An Undersea Journey was published in 1992. His subsequent books include Water Light Time, Great Barrier Reef, Fish Face, and Face to Face with Sharks. His latest book is Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea.