Other Oceans

Millions of people visit aquariums each year. These showplaces are invaluable educational tools and, more importantly, provide a window into a mysterious world that few of us will ever experience firsthand. But that world is increasingly threatened by human misuse–by pollution, over-fishing, global warming. Accompanying the waste and devastation is a global trend toward building bigger, more fantastic aquariums. Marvels of architecture and engineering, these artificial oceans seem to be our way of preserving the sea even as we destroy it.

The stunning black and white duotones presented in Other Oceans are the result of visits to fourteen aquariums in the United States and Japan and diving trips off the coasts of California (including Santa Barbara Island), Hawai'i, and Midway Atoll. In his work, award-winning photographer Wayne Levin seeks to understand and depict not only our complex relationship with captive marine life, but our love affair with technology, our desire for contact with other species, our impulse to educate, our capacity to dominate. Together with text by Thomas Farber and essays by Bruce A. Carlson, director of the Waikiki Aquarium, and nature writer and poet Frank Stewart, the captivating images gathered here will forever change the way we view these “other oceans.”

• Thomas Farber, Editor

  Thomas Farber is the author of more than two dozen books of fiction, non-fiction, and epigrams, as well as a screenplay and numerous collaborations on photography. Awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, he has been a Fulbright Scholar, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Wayne Levin, Photographer