Zena Holloway, U/W Photographer
Posted By Branon Edwards on 2 April 2003
Bold. Striking. Imaginative. All are words that describe the work of
international photographer, Zena Holloway. What makes her work even more
unique is that most of her subjects happen to be underwater.
Zena started her scuba career at the young age of sixteen. She says, "I've always been crazy about being in and underwater water. Scuba Diving just sounded such an amazingly fantastic, surreal thing to do. Having now done it I still think so." She says circumstance brought her to diving, she simply "signed [herself] for a course and a few years later traveled to Egypt where [she] really got hooked." When asked how she became one of PADI's youngest dive instructors at age eighteen, she explains that it wasn't a love of teaching, but rather an excuse to stay in Egypt and continue to fund her diving.
One would think that becoming a instructor for an eighteen-year-old woman would pose a number of unique obstacles, but she quickly explains away the question, "I don't really do the women's' lib thing. My feeling is that if you aren't good enough to compete with the blokes without any special treatment then you shouldn't be doing it. The same applies to everything I do - I would hate to get to the end of my career and think I'd won a race only because I'd started with a handicap." Certainly from the looks of her work and her resume, she not only seems to be winning the race, but also that she is bypassing most of the "blokes" with break-neck speed.
Regarding her experiences first as a scuba diving guide in Egypt and then an underwater videographer and photographer in Grand Cayman and the British West Indies, she states that, "It was fun, not exactly mentally taxing, but doing over 1500 dives in 3 years makes you a great diver by the end of it - which is pretty essential in my line of work." Her line of work now takes her around the globe for such clients as Faberge, BBC, The Body Shop, Dive Magazine, EMI, Dazed + Confused, Virgin Cosmetics, Playstation, Unibanco, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and a host of other international companies and publications. She says she discovered her love of photography when she got bored with teaching and instantly became hooked after picking up the camera. She confesses however, that her photography experience before that was, "holiday snaps with a compact."
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