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first underwater photography book

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 5:42 pm
by eskimo3883
I believe this is the first book ever published on underwater photography.

La photographie sous-marine et les progreĢ€s de la photographie
by Boutan, Louis, 1859-, Originally published in1900

I have a copy of the magazine article publish shortly before the book with some photos and text which I have seen several times for sale for ~$20 USD. I have only found two copies of the book up for sale and both were a bit out of my budget. The first was ~$500 USD. The second copy is curently on ebay with a price of US $3,456.49

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Photographie-so ... SwIgNXmJoV

The book is now in public domain and can be purchased as a reproduction:

https://www.amazon.fr/photographie-sous ... 2012724523

The following online archive has legal downloads available for free in several formats:

https://archive.org/details/laphotographieso00bout

If you view the online book in thumb view you can advance to the photos and diagrams and avoid the french language. The pages are high resolution so once you are on a page you like you can enlarge it for greater detail.

Re: first underwater photography book

Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 5:36 am
by Britmarine
What a great find! Thank you so much for drawing our attention to this book. The eBay seller of the antiquarian version also credits the book's author with the world's first underwater selfie:
Image
It's wonderful too that those of us who can't afford such prices can still have access to the text and illustrations on the pages of the tome via a free downloadable and searchable PDF. This enables readers who don't know French to use Google Translate or similar to access the gist if not the elegance of the original prose.

Re: first underwater photography book

Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 10:48 am
by USdiver
Fantastic, I wish that I had $3,500 burning a hole in my pocket, somebody's gonna get a rare and historic book.

Re: first underwater photography book

Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 2:42 pm
by sitkadiver
Only 20 Euro for the reproduction seems like a good deal. I'll have to check on shipping after work.

Thanks for sharing. :D

Re: first underwater photography book

Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:37 pm
by hirolazuli
I'm actually looking for a coffee-table book about underwater photography. :D