The Undersea World of Emory Kristof

IF A PICTURE says a thousand words, the photographs and video by Emory Kristof (shown right) documenting the mysteries of the world’s oceans would fill volumes.

Kristof, B.S. ’64, journalism, who spent more than 43 years as a photographer for National Geographic, is internationally renowned for his high-tech underwater photography. Using robot cameras and remotely operated vehicles, he combines technical wizardry with an amazing photographic eye, detailing an environment miles beneath the surface.

Kristof: Making Photographic History

1963-64 Introduced the first full-color, 16-page signature in a college yearbook and was named college photographer of the year. 1976 Worked with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and its submersible dubbed ALVIN. His technologies and techniques made possible the first remote pictures of ALVIN on the ocean bottom at 3,000 meters. 1985 Created the preliminary designs of the electronic camera system for the Argo vehicle that located the Titanic (shown top left and above) and was part of the crew that found it. 1995 Led an expedition to recover the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald and produced the first deep-water images with high definition television. 1998 Received the J. Winton Lemon Fellowship Award from the National Press Photographers Association as one of the profession’s “most imaginative innovators.” 2000 Led a project to produce the first color images of the interior of the sunken battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

“There is kilometer after kilometer of deep water out there covering 70 percent of our planet, but we know more about the surface of the moon, and now Mars, than we do about most of our own world,” says Kristof, whose images have opened this undersea vista, offering hints of a world where humans seldom venture.

Using the latest technologies as his tools, Kristof says he approaches projects “in the same way a plumber just goes in and gets the job done.” Quite an understatement from the man who organized a Soviet Canadian expedition to shoot three-dimensional stills and video footage of the Titanic for an IMAX production, using what he calls “the most powerful lights ever set up to work in the deep ocean” and worked with shark specialist and Professor Emeritus Eugenie Clark to lure and photograph an eight-meter Pacific sleeper shark at 1,300 meters—the largest animal ever seen in the deep through a submarine porthole.

Kristof was always mesmerized by the sea, especially the underwater images of Jacques Cousteau, and made a career of combining his passions for photography and scuba diving. As an undergraduate, he worked on the university yearbook, Terrapin, and the humor magazine, Old Line. One of his first underwater photographic essays was staged on the College Park campus.

Following intense spring flooding, Kristof planned a satiric photo essay for Old Line to give students a view of the life aquatic that included desks, chairs, books, papers and “anyone who could swim and was willing to get wet.” Although the prank contributed to the demise of the magazine, it marked the beginning of a lifetime of undersea explorations that will be included in a special exhibit this fall. The retrospective will feature Kristof’s early work on campus, in National Geographic, as well as the Titanic expedition and his use of engineering in photography. —NG

The exhibit, “Emory Kristof: Around the World in 800,000 Chromes,” sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, with support from National Geographic, is on view at the Union Gallery in the Adele H. Stamp Student Union through November 2.

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