Underwater Photography For Humanity: Dinis Guarda Interviews Christy Lee Rogers In His YouTube Podcast
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Author, entrepreneur, artist, and global thought leader, Dinis Guarda interviews Christy Lee Rogers, an iconic underwater photographer. The episode for his YouTube Podcast highlights her iconic projects with underwater photography and Christy’s recent collaboration with Disney and director James Cameron on the ‘Keep Our Oceans Amazing’ campaign to support ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com.
Christy Lee Rogers is a fine art photographer and an iconic personality for her underwater photography. Her works have been exhibited globally from Paris, London, Italy, Mexico City to Shanghai, Sao Paulo, South Africa, Los Angeles and more, and are held in private and public collections throughout the world.
She has been featured in International Magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar Art China, Elle Decoration, Global Times, The Independent, Casa Vogue, Photo Technique, Photo Korea and others.
During the interview, Christy tells Dinis about her underwater photography experiences:
“It's my passion to express myself through work that needed to come out through the images that I couldn't say with words. So it was kind of a relief to find the water and use that as a resource and a tool to create these images and I actually finally felt like I could communicate with people.
If I'm going to shoot at night and it's pitch black outside, I'm going to need some really harsh lights. All you'd see is everything would be illuminated and then the shadows would just drop off and the blackness of the night. I started to really like that because it was expressing the emotions that I had inside of me. You can easily capture the movement and the drama, like capturing the moment in time. So that's what I've kind of grown into is just letting the individuals underwater move so you capture this emotional moment in their experience which is very vulnerable underwater. When you've got these harsh lights underwater you're going to just get these really amazing pops of color. If I'm using the right fabrics, the light is just sort of shining through there and just illuminating everything.”
Ocean Conservation with underwater photography: The James Cameron Avatar Commission
Disney collaborated with team ‘Avatar’ to launch a global campaign ‘Keep Our Oceans Amazing’ that raises awareness of the challenges faced by oceans and marine life. In celebration of ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ and the global ‘Keep Our Oceans Amazing’ campaign, James Cameron and Disney commissioned Christy to create a collection of photographs that celebrate oceans.
The artworks featured the film’s stars Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet. 100% of net proceeds from the art sales went to The Nature Conservancy to help protect 10 of the world’s ocean’s amazing animals and their habitats.
Speaking about her passion to use her work as medium to create awareness about marine ecosystems, Christy told Dinis:
“I just started to realise that people were not respecting the water as much as I wanted them to. I'd see plastics on the beach or I'd see the water being so dirty and these animals showing up with tumors like Turtles and I it just started to get to me what was happening here. I just see how much we need water on this planet you know and so that's how it all came together."
The Nature Conservancy, Christy tells Dinis, is taking significant steps to protect certain parts of the oceans. “Its mission is to protect a certain percentage of sea life and the ocean for over a 10 year period”, she tells Dinis.
She also explained about her role in the campaign:
“Our main focus was like how we can use art how can we use this art to bring awareness to the conditions of the ocean and all of the beautiful sea life you know and and I think Jim and I really know what's happening you know with with some of these like you know extinction of certain sea creatures and like the tumors and that these little microplastics that end up in in the fishes that then we are eating and and it's like a whole cycle.”
Christy’s other humanitarian projects
During the interview, Christy urges audiences to go deeper into the human experience and discover the beauty that lies under the surface with every new work. She highlights her recent and upcoming work:
“The recent collection that I released was called Luminesence, and that was my experiments before I started ‘The way of water’. It is with flashlights underwater so you've got these really amazing pops of light and my fascination with wavelengths and the electromagnetic spectrum.
The newest collection and some of those will be on display as well on the island in Sweden. We're doing a very big exhibition over the summer with that. Then I actually have a show at the Parthenon Museum here in Nashville. That's the Greek Muses inspired show. I want to tell many stories, now with the War happening. I get so frustrated with this constant war so there might be a little message in there you know because I always like to kind of dive in the dark stuff but then bring us out the other end into the hope.”
The full video interview is available on Dinis Guarda YouTube channel.
The audio podcasts are available on: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, and others.
With a driving passion to create a relatable content, Pallavi progressed from writing as a freelancer to full-time professional. Science, innovation, technology, economics are very few (but not limiting) fields she zealous about. Reading, writing, and teaching are the other activities she loves to get involved beyond content writing for intelligenthq.com, citiesabc.com, and openbusinesscouncil.org
