Water Light Time

When David Doubilet was a child, he photographed swimmers in the waters off of New Jersey. Water Light Time is a collection of images that capture the underwater magnificence that seized the photographer's imagination in childhood and spurred a lifelong fascination. Underwater plant life floating like snakes, bright blue water filled with schools of silver fish, a diver immersed in a throng of bubbling yellow jellyfish, a close-up of pink and white sea anemones looking all the world like a floating bouquet of flowers--each image in this book is exquisitely photographed with preternaturally clear colors, full of detail and depth. Some images toy with perspective, creating surreal tableaux as a crustacean leg pokes out of the yellow-green water to appear almost as large as a nearby tree.With a career that started as a National Geographic photographer in 1972, Doubilet has a lifetime of experience from which to make such a marvelous meditation on this otherworld that is vaguely familiar to most readers only through pictures and visits to aquariums. Doubilet captures what must surely be his own awe at the uniqueness of being a human in this nonhuman environment, and the reader can marvel at both the lushness of life in the water and at the beauty of the photographs themselves, which dominate almost all of the book's 240 pages. --Jennifer Cohen