Journal #12
Imaging
Publish Date: June 1995
Bringing Home The Image
An Interview With Emory Kristof—The William Henry Jackson of the Deep Ocean
“All that innovation over the years was directed towards one goal, bringing home the image.”
– Emory Kristof, National Geographic, NOV 1994
After 30 years of making pictures for the National geographic—in many cases where simply getting the picture was cause for celebration—Emory Kristof’s star is definitely on the riose. His “dream” project—a 12 million digital deep ocean HDTV production, which promises in Kristof’s words to be as “close to a trip to another planet as most of us will have in the next four generations,” has attracted the attention of at least one Hollywood Don.
An image junkie’s fix?
What else can you do when your photobook reads like something out of “Mission Impossible”; inaccessible shipwrecks, Russian subs, giant six-gilled sharks, deep sea vents, the Loch Ness Monster (well almost), fighter planes, space, the Serengeti? Maybe that’s why the ecelctic 52-year old image maker is regarded as a legend in his time. To those in the know he’s the shit.
Your photographic career has encompassed so many areas: the space program, aeronautics, the Vietnam War, the Serengetti animal migration, energy generation, and the better part of twenty years imaging the deep ocean. What did you want to be when you grew up?
Kristof: I grew up wanting to be Tom Swift and I’m probably as close a model to him as there is on the planet—Lazarkof and this group of computer nerds and robots, piloting Russian submarines to the bottom of the ocean. All of these crazy adventures and I have the photobook to prove it.
Emory Kristof and his flying lab?
It was the ’50s. I was interested in rockets, math, science, and engineering. Sputnik was going up and America needed rocket engineers. I got accepted into a work–shift program in chemical engineering at the University of New Mexico, where I was going to work six months a year at the White Sands Proving Grounds.
Photo courtesy of Emory Kristof
Is that when you got interested in diving?
My earliest recollection of diving is 1954 from the movie, “Silent World.” The images of those divers descending into the night with burning magnesium torches really did it for me. I got a Squale mask like Jacques Cousteau, and I would chug around the Georgetown [Washington, DC] swimming pool getting pennies off the bottom and pulling a hair-ball out of the drain every now and then. God, I loved it. I spent my summers doing that. My other love was photography.
Six weeks before I was to go off to New Mexico, I decided that I wanted to be a magazine photographer instead. I couldn’t afford to go to one of the mainline schools, so I stayed close to home and entered the University of Maryland, which is where I met my mentor, Jimmy Bedford.
Bedford was about thirty-four years-old, had just spent three years going around the world making pictures, and represented wanderlust squared. He started out from the Midwest with a nickel in his pocket, packing a small enlarger and his whole goddamn world on a motor scooter, and ended up on the Serenghetti Plain. He managed to print some pictures, sell them, and that got him some gas to go the next little leg on his trip, and on it went. He was certainly an inspiration and someone who really taught us how to do more with less. This was a legendary guy. He went around the world on the cheap and had a good time doing it.
Photo courtesy of Emory Kristof
When did you start at the Geographic?
I was hired as a summer intern in June 1963 while still at the University of Maryland. Bob Gilka, who was Geographic’s Director of Photography, wanted an internship program and sent letters to six schools known for producing photographers, asking each school to recommend one student. Jimmy Bedford recommended me.
Gilka’s another legendary character. He’s about eighty years old right now and just as sharp as when he hired me. A very, very tough guy on the exterior, with a wonderful warm interior. You had to know him at least five minutes to find that out.
When I eventually went to see Gilka for my Geographic interview, he was on a long distance line to India, screaming at the top of his voice to one of his photographers. They didn’t have satellites back then—it was a essentially a can and string to Madras. So, Gilka pulls a gun out of his desk drawer. I thought, “Geez, I knew this guy was tough, but…” It turns out it was actually a starter pistol. A minute later, he held the phone at arm’s length and shot the pistol off right into the damn phone transmitter, and then went on talking like nothing happened. A half a world away, the photographer, who just had this thing go off in his ear, was probably half deaf and cursing the Indian phone system. At that point I realized that Gilka was very tightly wired and Geographic could be a lot of fun, which it definitely was, working with Bob Gilka.
It seems amazing to me that you were at Geographic for more than 30 years. What kept you there?
It’s like Willie Sutton talking about why he robbed banks—because that’s where the money was. When I got the opportunity at National Geographic, I started looking at about the same way. If I wanted to roam around the world and do all this neat stuff, Geographic was where the money was.
There was nothing else I really wanted to be. Not even President of the United States. Basically, I thought that having an unlimited American Express card and a six-pack of Nikons and all the film I could shoot—that wasn’t bad. Geographic has changed quite a bit, but for awhile there you could pretty much do any kind of story you wanted.
How did assignments work?
We used to have competitions among the staff photographers. We’d sit there at lunch and somebody would come up with an outlandish place like Timbuktu or Borneo that no one had been assigned to. Then we’d make up the assignment and go in there and work the system and get our airline ticket to Borneo. Sell it to them. In effect, I could essentially go anywhere in the world I wanted to go.
We basically set our own agenda, but you were expected to produce pictures they could use for the magazine—stuff of the “highest order.” Of course with Gilka, there was a lot of room for maneuvering. He was a marvelous manager—one of the best I’ve seen in dealing with a lot of creative egos. He knew he had a lot of free spirits and knew how to keep us creative and producing. The result was an organization that took everybody’s differences into consideration and welded them together without all the back-biting and jealousies usually associated with diverse creative egos. It was like the three Musketeers: “One for all, and all for one.” We were all happy when somebody else got an award. If somebody was doing something that was new and different, you looked at it as a technique that maybe you could use or you could top. So that next month all the guys would say, “Jesus Christ, that’s incredibly good!”
How large was the staff?
I think we had 21or 22 people. By comparison, Geographic now has two photographers on staff. They’ve decided to use contractors and freelancers, and in this business, that makes a lot of sense.
Photography is highly physical business. It’s more like professional athletics than it is a cerebral exercise. You have a lot of stuff to carry. It’s not like writing. The writer doesn’t necessarily have to climb the goddamn mountain to get the sunrise. He just takes out a notebook, stands off to the side 5000 feet below and writes some glowing terms after looking at the photographer’s picture: “Magnificent sunset over the Serenghetti Plain shot from Mount Kilamanjaro.” Writers have a lot of leeway.
I worked on a story in Alaska years ago, a cover story, and spent the better part of four months on the North Slope and six weeks in Barrow. I had all this time and all this frostbite. The writer spent something like a total of eleven days there. Most of the story was written from the bar in the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. It was a swell story too; the guy did his job. But he didn’t have to go out there and do it in the field.
I think there’s a problem that in magazine photography—and in a lot of diving too—you’re talking about something that’s very, very physical, requires a high energy level, and requires a young person’s healing powers; it’s not a job for older people. I once asked Gilka, who had put together a staff of really good young people, “Bob, what’s going to happen when the staff gets older?” He just gave me this evil, goddamn grin and said, “I’m not going to be here to worry about it.”
Talk to me about remote cameras?
Remote cameras really came into their own in the early ’60s. They unloaded all these motor Nikons on me and I did a couple of jobs where I saw the possibilities for the motor drives.
My first Air Force assignment was a good test. I used remote cameras to do these jet fighter and weapons detonation projects, and showed a talent for this type of photography. They then assigned me to the space program—Pad 19 at Cape Kennedy. I did all the liftoffs from Gemini V through Gemini XII. It was a photo pool arrangement among Life Magazine, AP, UPI, National Geographic, and couple of science services. There were two passes for actually working the launch pad. I had one and Ralph Morse from Life had the other. We put in really close remote cameras that did the liftoffs for the press; then we put in remote cameras to make pictures of the astronauts waving “goodbye” in outer space.
At that point, I was gaining an expertise in remote cameras and could hang a remote on just about anything. They then had me do a story on sailplanes, and so I rigged all sorts of cameras all over the sailplanes. That was a breakthrough story for me. I showed aircraft pictures that hadn’t been done before.
At the same time I was building my skill in diving and would try to work underwater pictures into as many stories as I could. The first one I had published was from Lake Champlain. Finally, because I was sneaking in these underwater pictures, they assigned me to go to Bermuda to do a story with Teddy Tucker and Peter Benchley.
We went out catching sharks on long-lines. Benchley was a smart one. While I was taking pictures, he listened to all of Tucker’s yarns about sharks and shipwrecks and turned it into Jaws and then made The Deep.
That’s when you started getting into the deep stuff?
I got assigned Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Service) the first international science community study using deep-diving boats—the ALVIN and the 3,000-meter French sub Ciana. The first dives were made on the mid-Atlantic ridge.
I had just come in from doing a country story in Tanzania; four and a half months in field getting the Serenghetti animal migration and, God, it was something I always wanted to do. So we’re living large here. I thought, “Well, I did the Serenghetti migration last week; now I guess I can go out here in deep ocean.” I mean the balls were so big you had to wheel–barrow them around. All the male hormones were flowing in gallon containers. It was disgusting, but I loved every politically incorrect moment of it.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to get to dive the ALVIN. Instead, I made pictures of the people getting in and out of the submarine, doing chores on the deck and that type of thing.
After looking at the quality of photography they were getting with the submersibles, and the support with tow cameras, I thought that it was pretty bad. They were taking pictures through the portholes, and the widest lens used was like a 35mm. The lens would give you a picture about seven feet across. They were using the Edgerton EG&G cameras that had been the standard in the business for 25 years ever since Doc Edgerton had gotten a grant from Geographic to build them. The problem was that no one had done anything to improve them in 25 years.
Of course a scientist would say, “Well, we don’t need National Geographic quality; what we get here is good enough.” That’s bullshit. Good images are good images, and good images will do better science for you than bad images. They have more information. Something you could bring to the party.
The whole secret to underwater photography is to eliminate as much of the water as possible, and you do that with wide angle lenses for the most part. By that time, underwater photography at Geographic was getting pretty sophisticated, and I felt that one of the contributions I could make, after being on that expedition, was to introduce the scientific community to what we were doing in shallow water photography.
So I introduced them to wide angle lenses and corrected optics. We got ‘em into color film, color processing and to larger strobes and better disbursement between the strobe light and the camera. All of these things, then, started with that first trip in 1974. I’ve worked with Bob Ballard for 11 years and we got him up to speed photographically—he didn’t know which end of a camera to point when we started.
How large was the staff?
I think we had 21or 22 people. By comparison, Geographic now has two photographers on staff. They’ve decided to use contractors and freelancers, and in this business, that makes a lot of sense.
Photography is highly physical business. It’s more like professional athletics than it is a cerebral exercise. You have a lot of stuff to carry. It’s not like writing. The writer doesn’t necessarily have to climb the goddamn mountain to get the sunrise. He just takes out a notebook, stands off to the side 5000 feet below and writes some glowing terms after looking at the photographer’s picture: “Magnificent sunset over the Serenghetti Plain shot from Mount Kilamanjaro.” Writers have a lot of leeway.
I worked on a story in Alaska years ago, a cover story, and spent the better part of four months on the North Slope and six weeks in Barrow. I had all this time and all this frostbite. The writer spent something like a total of eleven days there. Most of the story was written from the bar in the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. It was a swell story too; the guy did his job. But he didn’t have to go out there and do it in the field.
I think there’s a problem that in magazine photography—and in a lot of diving too—you’re talking about something that’s very, very physical, requires a high energy level, and requires a young person’s healing powers; it’s not a job for older people. I once asked Gilka, who had put together a staff of really good young people, “Bob, what’s going to happen when the staff gets older?” He just gave me this evil, goddamn grin and said, “I’m not going to be here to worry about it.”
What are the technical problems in making these images in the deep ocean?
The hard part of working anything in the deep ocean is finding the target. One of Ballard’s great contributions to deep ocean photography is that he understood that submarines were very poor scouting machines. A submarine is a dandy thing to go down in and do brain surgery on something that’s been found on the bottom, but is not useful for finding things. You need camera sleds to go scouting within an acoustic net…
Photo courtesy of Emory Kristof“Acoustic net” meaning you have a sonic grid that allows you to pinpoint where the target is?
That’s right. We put acoustic transducers on the bottom and you triangulate from them. Everything is beeping back and forth at each other, and on the surface you can determine the x–y position of your camera sled. Then you can vector the submarine to the target.
Back in FAMOUS, they found their diving targets—a pair of volcanoes—with a surface depth sounder that only enabled them to locate a target a half–mile across at about 9000 feet, “Today we dive ze north slope of Mount Pluto.” [in faked French accent.] “Very good, François, it’s a half-mile target at 9,000 feet.” That’s was about the degree of resolution that we had back then. They had a camera sled, but it wasn’t of much use in targeting.
The EG&G camera was black-and-white and had a watch that would put a tiny time hack on the picture, but seven frames away. When you printed the stuff up in the darkroom, you’d print the picture of the bottom, then you’d go seven frames away and print the clock, and then staple that to the back of the original print. You ended up with be a big pile of black-and-white prints. By the time the scientists went through this pile, the pictures were all mixed up; there was no way to try to use them to determine dive sites.
You went back out in 1976…
After Geographic did the FAMOUS story in ’74, Ballard wanted to go out and look at the Cayman Trough and we pitched the story to Geographic‘s editor, Gilbert Grosvenor, who was concerned that that we had already done the deep-ocean. Ballard and I figured we could build a remote camera and take a picture of ALVIN on the bottom. That sounded good to the Grosvenor, so based on the fact that we could do a “stunt,” he approved the second story.
Sam Raymond, a protege of Doc Edgerton’s who had a company called Benthos, bought the rights to produce the cameras and put in an LED watch that would imprint the time on the actual photograph that you were making. We set Ballard up with a 28mm lense on his tote camera and a remote flash so we could now have a slightly wider pictures with the time hack on it, which could be timed to our navigation net and give an x–y position. But we needed to be able to process the film, and so Pete Petrone, the head guy in our color lab, set up the first color lab on a Woods Hole ship and the film was hand-dunked on board.
We then used a 16mm lens on the remote and made the first picture of ALVIN. Of all of my published pictures, that one of the ALVIN on the bottom at 12,000 f/3,685 m—has been run just about everywhere, and for years was the only picture or set of pictures that showed a submarine working at depths. We finished the project and realized we wanted to put the 16mm lens onto the tow camera to increase its range and we needed bigger strobes.
The tow camera is used primarily for targeting as opposed to actually getting the images you want?
Exactly. The tow camera was the scout. It really made the expedition. Then In 1976, Ballard told me that they were going to go out looking at hot water volcanic vents in the Gallapagos Rift. We knew nothing about the vents at that point, except that they were there and been found primarily through water chemistry. He felt the camera system would find those vents. At that time there were no images of them.
One thing I learned in my diving experience and in ten years of doing energy stories for Geographic was that wherever you dump hot waste water into the environment, you get an upsurge in animal life. This interested me. Another thing I became interested in was work by John Isaacs, a scientist from Scripps, who came up with the concept for “monster cameras.” He built up this wonderful library of deep–ocean animals we’d never seen before.
So when Ballard told me about the expedition to go diving on the hot-water vents, I thought, “hot water…animals…John Isaacs…yes!” I went to Geographic and told them we had to go on this expedition, and that I want to build this animal camera. They looked at me and said, “We’ve just run two deep-ocean stories; we don’t need to do the it again.” Ballard and I really wanted to do this thing, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to build this camera system but I decided I was going to learn. And there were a few other problems.
First off, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wouldn’t approve the use of color film. They felt it was a frill. It turns out that what we’re seeing at the vents is all sorts of chemical staining on the bottom, and the chemical staining gives away a lot of mineral content and is a very good tool. Black-and-white doesn’t tell you skiduche about that. So the first thing he found out was that there wasn’t any money for color film.
To make matters worse, they wouldn’t give him any money to process the film on the ship. They told him that he could process it when he got back in. Imagine—you have a $3 million expedition to study an area a half mile square 9000 f/2,763 m down. Everybody’s assigned so much ship time to do different things. You have people doing dredges; one guy’s got heat flow, so he’s blindly dropping a thermature over the side trying to find temperature spikes; and you’ve got Ballard out there towing his cameras back and forth. But only the head and tail of the film could be processed to make sure the camera was functioning. We wouldn’t be able to process the thousands and thousands of pictures taken at sea. So when the expedition’s was over, you’d develop the rest of pictures and say, “Oh, there it is! We should have been concentrating in that area. Let’s get another $3 million to go back out there.” All for the want of film processing. Basically, it was a matter of being unable to pat your stomach and your head at the same time.
Ballard believed that he could pick sites for the submarine to dive by searching with a photographic vehicle—we didn’t have television yet—and process the color film on board. The submarine has no talent as a scout because of its limited time on the bottom. It’s limited battery and could only look at a very small part of the bottom compared to the tote camera. Ballard wanted to integrate those two technologies, and it was considered heresy. Nobody else in that sciencific community got it, from the NSF people right on down to the other scientists he was working with.
So, how did you do the hot water vent story ?
I was looking for a means to design and test the camera that Ballard and I wanted to put down in the deep-sea vents. It was now 1976 and the Loch Ness Monster was “big.” The Academy of Applied Sciences was involved and the New York Times was sponsoring $50,000 of that expedition. Garry Trudeau was even drawing “Doonesbury” from Loch Ness. David Doubilet and I figured it was a real opportunity and the Geographic ought to jump into it.
Geographic agreed to do the story on Loch Ness. We worked out the different problems of how to build a camera that would operate reliably for animal-baiting, and went to run the great Loch Ness Monster Hunt. For 53 days we ran the camera system up and down. Of course the only thing we got out of Loch Ness was the world’s most expensive picture of an eel. But we now knew what to do with the camera.
Unfortunately the magazine still wouldn’t approve our going out to the Gallapagos Rift—“it had all been done.” But then Bob Gilka assigned his entire 1977 R&D budget to me. We cleaned it out. Since Ballard didn’t have enough money for color film or processing—he was going to have to shoot black-and-white film and process it when he got back—I traded him $10,000 worth of Ektachrome film and processing, Pete Petrone from the lab, and all the chemistry necessary to process the stuff…for one-third of his ship time. That’s how these things really work. Ballard got what he wanted, and I bought 5% of a $3 million expedition for $10,000! A pretty good deal. I was going to launch my creature camera.
I got to do 27 straight days on the bottom of baiting, which gave me a really good feel for what would come into a camera down at 9,000 f/2,763 m. Of course, having the color film and processing for the sled made it possible to find the vents. The chief scientist was going to do it with heat. So we put the camera sled down there, brrrr, and it starts mowing the lawn, and comes back and we’ve got the first pictures of the animals at the bottom. We had to build a projector for Ballard so he could look at this stuff. It was an old Rolleiflex projector designed for 70mm that we adapted. Twelve hours after the film was shot, we’d be in a cabin looking at a reel of 3000 exposures.
By the time ALVIN arrived, we were already picking the targets for it with the camera sled. About three weeks into the expedition, the co-chief scientist came up to me just bubbling that here we were doing three years of oceanography in three weeks by having this camera sled out. It surprising sometimes how a really simple good idea is so hard to sell.
In retrospect it must have seemed so obvious—once they saw the images and what you accomplished.
We found six vents out there with the camera system. One was dead; you wouldn’t have found it by dunking a thermometer blindly on the surface and diving the submarine blindly. Eventually, they stuck the electric thermometer on a camera sled, and we began getting both readings. Another thing they found is that those vents were not all that hot, and you could miss a spike on the vent because the temperature differential was not as great as the ones off of Mexico, which are putting outwater at 600° F/315° C. The water temperature in the Gallapagos is more like 80° F/27° C for the hotter vents.
After the success of the ’77 expedition—actually flying in the vents with the camera sled—the NSF was willing to put money into a color auto-processor for Ballard and Woods Hole. Pete Petrone of our lab figured out how to change the baths around so we could use salt water in the auto-processor. To do this deep-hole water work, we developed special cameras, light decks, and an auto-processor that enabled us to change the film at sea.
So that became the technology that you used to find the Titanic?
After the vent discovery in ’77, Ballard and I became more convinced that a big optical camera was the way to go for doing a shipwreck search in the deep ocean. The problem was how to widen the search area—to make bigger area pictures. The baiting camera was pretty focused; that did a fine job, but we wanted to make big pictures. That was the birth of the ARGO system which eventually found the Titanic. In fact, I actually gave a paper on on this in 1977 at Woods Hole to a group of very interested scientists from across the country.
There are three things you can do to make the pictures bigger in the deep ocean, three things that you can control: faster film, more light or more F stop, and a faster lens. You’re very limited in the lighting after a while—just on how many F-stops, how much white can you pump down, especially on battery-power. We concluded that 1500-watt-seconds of light was as much as we could get out of a strobe system. Then Woods Hole went ahead and built a 1500-watt lighting system for ARGO, and we established that parameter.
We weren’t going to build new lenses because the difference between, say, an F2.8 lens and an F1 lens really is not all that great, and it wouldn’t be worth putting the money into it. Color films at the time were in 200 to 400 ASA range—we could have gone to a black-and-white film that had 3200 ASA, but it was all kind of marginal coming at it with this technology. You could pick up two stops here, maybe four stops there with the lighting.
My idea was to increase film speed by going to low-light television cameras; these were the first of the silicon intensified target (SIT) cameras with ASAs equivalent to 200,000 compared to an ASA of 200 for color film. So we could actually pick up about 13.5 stops by going from film to video, run a coaxial cable and bring up frozen video images to the surface.
In retrospect it must have seemed so obvious—once they saw the images and what you accomplished.
We found six vents out there with the camera system. One was dead; you wouldn’t have found it by dunking a thermometer blindly on the surface and diving the submarine blindly. Eventually, they stuck the electric thermometer on a camera sled, and we began getting both readings. Another thing they found is that those vents were not all that hot, and you could miss a spike on the vent because the temperature differential was not as great as the ones off of Mexico, which are putting outwater at 600° F/315° C. The water temperature in the Gallapagos is more like 80° F/27° C for the hotter vents.
After the success of the ’77 expedition—actually flying in the vents with the camera sled—the NSF was willing to put money into a color auto-processor for Ballard and Woods Hole. Pete Petrone of our lab figured out how to change the baths around so we could use salt water in the auto-processor. To do this deep-hole water work, we developed special cameras, light decks, and an auto-processor that enabled us to change the film at sea.
So that became the technology that you used to find the Titanic?
After the vent discovery in ’77, Ballard and I became more convinced that a big optical camera was the way to go for doing a shipwreck search in the deep ocean. The problem was how to widen the search area—to make bigger area pictures. The baiting camera was pretty focused; that did a fine job, but we wanted to make big pictures. That was the birth of the ARGO system which eventually found the Titanic. In fact, I actually gave a paper on on this in 1977 at Woods Hole to a group of very interested scientists from across the country.
There are three things you can do to make the pictures bigger in the deep ocean, three things that you can control: faster film, more light or more F stop, and a faster lens. You’re very limited in the lighting after a while—just on how many F-stops, how much white can you pump down, especially on battery-power. We concluded that 1500-watt-seconds of light was as much as we could get out of a strobe system. Then Woods Hole went ahead and built a 1500-watt lighting system for ARGO, and we established that parameter.
We weren’t going to build new lenses because the difference between, say, an F2.8 lens and an F1 lens really is not all that great, and it wouldn’t be worth putting the money into it. Color films at the time were in 200 to 400 ASA range—we could have gone to a black-and-white film that had 3200 ASA, but it was all kind of marginal coming at it with this technology. You could pick up two stops here, maybe four stops there with the lighting.
My idea was to increase film speed by going to low-light television cameras; these were the first of the silicon intensified target (SIT) cameras with ASAs equivalent to 200,000 compared to an ASA of 200 for color film. So we could actually pick up about 13.5 stops by going from film to video, run a coaxial cable and bring up frozen video images to the surface.
Photo courtesy of Emory Kristof
So, how did you do the hot water vent story ?
I was looking for a means to design and test the camera that Ballard and I wanted to put down in the deep-sea vents. It was now 1976 and the Loch Ness Monster was “big.” The Academy of Applied Sciences was involved and the New York Times was sponsoring $50,000 of that expedition. Garry Trudeau was even drawing “Doonesbury” from Loch Ness. David Doubilet and I figured it was a real opportunity and the Geographic ought to jump into it.
Geographic agreed to do the story on Loch Ness. We worked out the different problems of how to build a camera that would operate reliably for animal-baiting, and went to run the great Loch Ness Monster Hunt. For 53 days we ran the camera system up and down. Of course the only thing we got out of Loch Ness was the world’s most expensive picture of an eel. But we now knew what to do with the camera.
Unfortunately the magazine still wouldn’t approve our going out to the Gallapagos Rift—“it had all been done.” But then Bob Gilka assigned his entire 1977 R&D budget to me. We cleaned it out. Since Ballard didn’t have enough money for color film or processing—he was going to have to shoot black-and-white film and process it when he got back—I traded him $10,000 worth of Ektachrome film and processing, Pete Petrone from the lab, and all the chemistry necessary to process the stuff…for one-third of his ship time. That’s how these things really work. Ballard got what he wanted, and I bought 5% of a $3 million expedition for $10,000! A pretty good deal. I was going to launch my creature camera.
I got to do 27 straight days on the bottom of baiting, which gave me a really good feel for what would come into a camera down at 9,000 f/2,763 m. Of course, having the color film and processing for the sled made it possible to find the vents. The chief scientist was going to do it with heat. So we put the camera sled down there, brrrr, and it starts mowing the lawn, and comes back and we’ve got the first pictures of the animals at the bottom. We had to build a projector for Ballard so he could look at this stuff. It was an old Rolleiflex projector designed for 70mm that we adapted. Twelve hours after the film was shot, we’d be in a cabin looking at a reel of 3000 exposures.
By the time ALVIN arrived, we were already picking the targets for it with the camera sled. About three weeks into the expedition, the co-chief scientist came up to me just bubbling that here we were doing three years of oceanography in three weeks by having this camera sled out. It surprising sometimes how a really simple good idea is so hard to sell.
In retrospect it must have seemed so obvious—once they saw the images and what you accomplished.
We found six vents out there with the camera system. One was dead; you wouldn’t have found it by dunking a thermometer blindly on the surface and diving the submarine blindly. Eventually, they stuck the electric thermometer on a camera sled, and we began getting both readings. Another thing they found is that those vents were not all that hot, and you could miss a spike on the vent because the temperature differential was not as great as the ones off of Mexico, which are putting outwater at 600° F/315° C. The water temperature in the Gallapagos is more like 80° F/27° C for the hotter vents.
After the success of the ’77 expedition—actually flying in the vents with the camera sled—the NSF was willing to put money into a color auto-processor for Ballard and Woods Hole. Pete Petrone of our lab figured out how to change the baths around so we could use salt water in the auto-processor. To do this deep-hole water work, we developed special cameras, light decks, and an auto-processor that enabled us to change the film at sea.
So that became the technology that you used to find the Titanic?
After the vent discovery in ’77, Ballard and I became more convinced that a big optical camera was the way to go for doing a shipwreck search in the deep ocean. The problem was how to widen the search area—to make bigger area pictures. The baiting camera was pretty focused; that did a fine job, but we wanted to make big pictures. That was the birth of the ARGO system which eventually found the Titanic. In fact, I actually gave a paper on on this in 1977 at Woods Hole to a group of very interested scientists from across the country.
There are three things you can do to make the pictures bigger in the deep ocean, three things that you can control: faster film, more light or more F stop, and a faster lens. You’re very limited in the lighting after a while—just on how many F-stops, how much white can you pump down, especially on battery-power. We concluded that 1500-watt-seconds of light was as much as we could get out of a strobe system. Then Woods Hole went ahead and built a 1500-watt lighting system for ARGO, and we established that parameter.
We weren’t going to build new lenses because the difference between, say, an F2.8 lens and an F1 lens really is not all that great, and it wouldn’t be worth putting the money into it. Color films at the time were in 200 to 400 ASA range—we could have gone to a black-and-white film that had 3200 ASA, but it was all kind of marginal coming at it with this technology. You could pick up two stops here, maybe four stops there with the lighting.
My idea was to increase film speed by going to low-light television cameras; these were the first of the silicon intensified target (SIT) cameras with ASAs equivalent to 200,000 compared to an ASA of 200 for color film. So we could actually pick up about 13.5 stops by going from film to video, run a coaxial cable and bring up frozen video images to the surface.
At the aquaCORPS birthday party, you told me that your career was a story of youth vs. power.”
You try build a career and any career finally peaks out some place and then it’s [whistles downward, pop] downhill. I was saying that photography’s a young person’s game. You asked me, “Why did you stay at the Geographic?” I said, “Well, one thing is I’ve changed my direction several times at the Geographic and photography has always stayed young for me. I’ve always been excited, there’s always been something that I wanted to do, something that I wanted to make an image of.”
I don’t want to make the same images I made 25 years ago; I’m not interested in the subject matter that I did 25 years ago. But there’s always the excitement of the new project. I’m not fighting to do another story on ski slopes around Lake Tahoe; there are a lot of young people who can do that. But I determined when I was turning 40 that if I wanted to have a career in photography, top of the line, main line photography, then I’d better be able to do something so rare and wonderful for the Geographic that, as I got older, they couldn’t beg, borrow, steal or lease it some place else. That’s what pushed me into robotics and the deep sea. I really love it and see an opportunity to make images people have never seen before. I keep seeing new ways to get new animals, show new things.
To a great extent, looking at other photographers’ careers, I consider myself the William Henry Jackson of the deep ocean. Jackson did not discover Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and all those great monuments in the American West; he went out and brought back the first great images of those places, and created a understanding of the great treasures of the American West. Through his images, Jackson, more than anybody else, was probably responsible for the creation of the National Park System.
I feel that while I was not the first person to go down there and dive the deep ocean, I certainly have brought back the best images. A lot of worldwide awareness we have today has come from that.
Photo courtesy of Emory Kristof
You changed the world view.
I’ve traded my youth for power. Though I may have lost the physical steps as I’ve gotten older, I’ve aquired the power to do the bigger projects. So far, I’m still on the ascend, it’s the type of thing where you’re not going to get a young diving photographer saying, “I want to go out there and do what Emory Kristof does.” My response would be, “Your daddy better be very rich to do it! And you don’t have the experience that I’ve got.” The Geographic paid for a very expensive education.
The $12,000,000 man?
I think that I have made the most expensive set of animal pictures that exist on this planet. I may not have as many pictures in the yellow boxes as Dave Doubilet—he’s the Audubon of this century. David has done a wonderful job and has shown behaviors and has more good pictures of more animals than anybody else. The Geographic underwrote him to do that full-time.
What I’ve tried to do over the years is get the technology to the point where I can make images that look more and more like David’s because my early images were just pretty gross documentation. The fact that I got them at all initially got me big pats on the back, but I’m trying to make the pictures look more and more like David’s.
It’s exciting to have a career where you enjoy getting up in the morning and you see things you haven’t done or nobody has done yet, and you just want to go for it, jump all over it, heehaw!
Has Geographic changed over these years?
Quite a bit. They’re working with less money. They offered to buy out their senior staff last year and I took them up on their offer. There’s all sorts of ways you can look at it. I’m not trying to blast the Geographic in any way in your magazine; I was hired by the magazine to be a still photographer, and I’ve gotten more and more into motion imaging. I figure I have to do that to make my stills. I have an interest in how to do things like IMAX and virtual reality and things that really do not come with my turf as a still photographer.
It probably made the most sense to take the buy-out, to have the freedom to get into these areas that the Geographic doesn’t really know that it wants to get into. They’ve given me a very generous contract that allows me to go out fishing in these other waters. At times I scared the hell out of my senior management. They kept wondering at what point the volcano was going to go off and cover them in lava. I think the arrangement I have right now is maybe a healthier one.
The new editor, Bill Allen, certainly likes science and he likes what I do. He’d have been happy if I’d stayed on the staff, and so would my boss, Tom Kennedy. Although the organization supports what I’m doing, it goes beyond most of what the Geographic is considering doing. They weren’t going to organize two Russian submarines and HMI lights to go do the Titanic.
Now you have the freedom to create your own projects.
It’s the freedom to fail. Actually, what I think I want to do more than anything else right now is make a IMAX HDTV production on the hot water vents and deep water animals. It will be the most expensive, natural history film that anybody’s ever done. It will cost around $12 million. Normal IMAX films cost in the $2 to $6 million range, so we’re talking major, Hollywood-style money for this. That’s why I’m kind of excited to have the support of [True Lies director] Jim Cameron on this project. Cameron has a love for diving, a love for the ocean, and he certainly understands what we’ve done with the Russians. Cameron has the first development money in this. He’d like to help godfather this thing and get it done. And the only way to get it done is with a Cameron out there in Hollywood.
Do you anticipate having other sponsors ?
We’re working pretty hard to put them together. Right now, I’ve got Steven Low’s company [IMAX] doing a $25,000 film treatment and brochure to sell the project; that’s where Cameron’s money is going. I feel if we go down there with big lights, like we did with the Titanic, and show people the vents and those big black smokers, and animals, and a whole deep-water ecosystem, it will be as close to a trip to another planet as most of us will have in the next four generations. Nobody’s going to be beamed up by Scotty any time soon.
This series of ecosystems that have been discovered since 1977 give us an entirely different view of our planet, and it hasn’t really been photographed well. I’ve made most of the pictures people have seen, but they’ve been done with small lights from a single submarine. I now have the ability to get two Russian subs down there with the big HMI lights. It is going to look beyond the special effects for Star Trek. I want people to be excited about this. I want people to be able to share that experience.
Right now, this is my dream project. I can’t imagine trying to do one larger than this. If I nail this one, I’ll say, “Okay, that one was the peak and it’s all downhill from here. Then I can go out there and start chasing the giant squid.”
Asian Diver 1999 “Lutz of Vents”
The discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977 turned our collective view of life on Earth upside down, refuting the long held belief that all life depended on photosynthesis. Laying at average depths of more than a mile and a half down at pressures exceeding an over-filled aluminum eighty—more than 3500 psi—an exotic array of vent life-forms eke out a tumultuous existence under conditions resembling a toxic waste dump. Instead of sunlight, this deep-ocean ecosystem derives its energy from the heat and hydrogen sulfide generated by the Earth’s volcanic processes. More amazing still is that vent chemosynthesis, which some believe kick-started life here on Earth, may well represent the prevalent form of life-support on the planet and others in our solar system.
Having amassed one of the most extensive portfolios of vents, National Geographic photographer Emory Kristof describes them as “the closest thing to a trip to another world that we will experience in the next four generations.” Dr. Richard Lutz who is working with Kristof to produce the first HDTV show of this deep-sea oasis is quick to agree. Having participated in the first biological expedition to the Galapagos vents in 1979, the 49-year old Director of the Center For Deep-Sea Ecology and Biotechnology at Rutgers University has made more than 100 dives on the vents over the last two decades and is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field.
Lutz and his colleagues are currently working on DNA tagging studies in order to better understand the movement of vent creatures. Emory Kristof told me that if you put all the vent organisms on a scale, the sheer mass of them would outweigh all other life forms on Earth. There is speculation that there might be a huge sub-surface biomass of bacteria and microbes beneath the vents. That’s where those estimates come from. It’s not just the vent organisms themselves. In other words, giant tube worms are not necessarily the predominant form of life on the planet. No. But if there was a large subsurface population of bacteria it could be a substantial biomass. There are some indications of subsurface life but it has been hard to get a handle on and quantify.
How much do we actually understand about vent communities?
We’ve been working these environments intensively for two decades and understand a good deal about the vents that we’ve studied in detail. We’ve identified 300 new species in 90 new genera, 20 new families and one new phylum. But there are countless vents along the mid-ocean ridge system that haven’t been discovered yet. The mid-ocean ridge system extends some 40,000 miles. We’ve explored less than 10%. You’ve the opportunity to witness a new hydro-thermal vent being formed, the so-called “Genesis Vent.” It was April of 1991. I was on site during a volcanic eruption between nine and ten degrees north along the East Pacific Rise about 500 miles west of Acapulco. We refer to it as the Nine Degrees North Vent Field. The eruption wiped all of the existing biological communities and enabled us to follow the colonization of new organisms and the formation of new geological features from time zero. We’ve been following the biological succession for almost a decade. It’s still an evolving ecosystem. That’s the story that we’ve been trying piece together.
What have you learned from the genesis discovery?
It has dramatically changed our views about the rates at which certain biological and geological processes can occur in the deep ocean environment. Things are happening a lot faster than we ever imagined. To give you an example, we found that the giant tube worms which have become a symbol of the vents were growing faster than any other marine invertebrate By fast, I mean somewhere on the order of about a meter per year. That’s an order of magnitude faster than other invertebrates. We have also been able to get a good handle on the growth rates of geological chimneys, the ” black smokers”. When I was back in school, we believed that these things took eons to form. Now we know that they form in months and years. During one of our trips, we accidentally bumped into a 10-meter high sulfite chimney with Alvin and knocked it over. We returned two-months later and it had grown back almost seven meters. That gives you a perspective on how fast the geological processes are happening down there. The vents are very ephemeral and generally only last a few years to decades before they’re wiped out.
How does that kind of volatility affect that creatures that live there?
From an organism’s perspective, you know are not going to be around for a long period of time so you’ve got to develop strategies to colonize rapidly. You’ve got to grow rapidly, reach sexual maturity and cast your offspring into the deep waters of the ocean so that they can colonize other vent areas. They have to act quickly because their home is likely to be destroyed in short order. Giant tube worms for example reach sexual maturity and spawn within 21 months. You’ve also done DNA studies on the vents. We have conducted a series of genetic studies on both enzymes and the molecular genetics of organisms at a large number of vents throughout the world’s oceans and are starting to get a picture about gene flow and how they effectively move from one area to another.
Does vent life vary from site to site?
Yes, especially when you go to different ocean basins. For example, the organisms associated with vents along the mid-Atlantic ridge are dramatically different than those in the Eastern Pacific. They would have organisms within the same family and sometimes within the same genus, but there would be no shared species between the two ocean basins.
What have your genetic studies said about migration?
Where there is a continuous ridge system, for example along the East Pacific Rise that extends from the Guaymas Basin up in Mexico down to south of Easter Island, we’ve found the same species of mussel, for example, all the way along the ridge. That’s probably also the case for the giant tube worm and the large white clam as well—the three dominant vent organisms in that system. But as soon as you jump to another Eastern Pacific ridge system like the Juan de Fuca Ridge which separated by a few thousand kilometers of ocean, we find the same genera but different species. Their larvae cannot effectively make the jump from one ridge system to another. Another thing we’ve found from our studies is that within a given vent system, there are organisms that are morphologically just about indistinguishable—a classicist would say they’re the same species—but when you look at them genetically, they’re two distinct species. Their morphology is probably environmentally controlled. Conversely, there are organisms that have a lot of morphological different characteristics that end up being the same species. So there’s a lot of plasticity. There are range of things that appear similar but are different and things that appear but are the same.
Did life on Earth originate at the vents?
That’s one theory but it is a highly controversial. There are convincing arguments on both sides. One of the strongest points of evidence is that some of the isolated microbial forms at the vents occupy the most primitive node on the phylogenetic tree of life indicating they may be associated with the origin of life. You’re working with Kristof to produce a HDTV show on the vents contrasting them with what we may eventually discover on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Why Europa?
The reason that Europa is so exciting is that A: we know there’s been volcanic activity there and probably still is and B: there is evidence that it has an ice-covered surface. If you’ve got water and volcanic activity, you’ve got the two ingredients that could generate hydrothermal venting similar to Earth’s and ultimately an environment compatible with life. Though as John Delaney [a professor marine geology and geophysics at the University of Washington School of Oceanography] once said, they probably won’t be Klingons.
