From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Using the labor and knowledge of indigenous peoples while exoticizing and racializing them as inferior Others, Williamson and Hurley sustained colonial fantasies about people of color and the environment as endless resources to be plundered. As Elias demonstrates, their reckless treatment of the sea prefigured attitudes that caused the environmental crises that the oceans and reefs now face.

Seahorses are instantly recognisable and have been a part of our culture for millennia, yet we still know very little about these enigmatic creatures. Steve Trewhella and Julie Hatcher have spent hundreds of hours in British waters observing native seahorses, witnessing at first hand how they behave in the wild, and how they interact with the other plants and animals in their underwater realm. With stunning photography, In the Company of Seahorses paints a rich picture of a mysterious world amongst swaying seagrass and colourful seaweeds. The accompanying text is packed with personal anecdotes describing the authors' journey of discovery, illustrating for the first time the secretive lives of these elusive animals in British waters. By sharing one couple's passion for an entrancing ocean icon, this book aims to inspire, inform and create a better understanding of the seahorse and its often vulnerable habitats around the British coastline.

To capture an image of the crystal octopus, one of the ocean's rarest and most elusive creatures, became the ultimate goal in Ali bin Thalith's obsession with underwater marine photography. Over ten years of searching has produced cornucopia of extraordinary deep sea images, of which 100 are selected here, shot in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From Swimming with Giants to the God of Small Things, six chapters portray the inspirational qualities of marine life. Large mammals such as sharks, shoals of tuna, swimming antelope and elephants shot from below are truly exceptional. The microscopic creatures that camouflage themselves so expertly from their predators, coral gardens of the ocean bed, night dive images and the highly decorative patterns found on so much of marine life, provide a sourcebook not just for marine photography enthusiasts, but for everyone interested in colour, pattern and texture. Care is taken to explain the practicalities of the dive, the shoot, or the location and the author willingly shares the difficulties and the techniques of striving to achieve that perfect image.