AD 2016 Q1
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IMAGING<br />
SHOOTER<br />
SHOOTER: ZENA HOLLOWAY<br />
Photos by Zena Holloway; introduction by Stephen Frink<br />
Zena Holloway has evolved into one of the world’s<br />
top commercial underwater photographers in a<br />
circuitous and nontraditional fashion. She did not<br />
live by the sea as a child, and she does not point to<br />
Jacques Cousteau for her inspiration. She grew up in<br />
urban London until the age of eight, when she went<br />
off to boarding school in the countryside for the next<br />
eight years. Not much from those years suggested her<br />
future profession. However, there were the stories her<br />
mother told about her dad. Although he died when<br />
she was young, Holloway grew up hearing about<br />
how he loved scuba diving, and she decided she, too,<br />
should give it a try.<br />
LINDA LAIRD<br />
At 16 she enrolled in a diving course, and when she<br />
finished school at 18 she went on a dive holiday to the Red<br />
Sea. That’s when her life’s path took a plunge beneath the<br />
waves. Not ready to return to London at the end of her<br />
vacation, she got a job at a dive center and did odd jobs to<br />
make ends meet. She recalls being quite good at “cleaning<br />
the loo.” One advantage she had was being English where<br />
most of the captains and instructors were Egyptian. This<br />
gave her the language and cultural knowledge to work as a<br />
hostess aboard the daily dive boats.<br />
Holloway’s time in Egypt provided some great dive<br />
experiences, but to make a career of it she needed to<br />
become an instructor. She enrolled in an Instructor<br />
Development Course in Sharm el Sheikh and upon<br />
graduating got a job on Grand Cayman, first at Red Sail<br />
Sports and then at Bob Soto’s Diving, where she became<br />
one of three staff videographers filming the tourists as<br />
they dived.<br />
After three years she decided there was more to<br />
life than producing tourist videos and in 1995 headed<br />
back to London, where the underwater production<br />
94 | WINTER <strong>2016</strong>