Laurent Ballesta first fell in love with the underwater world through the lens of Jacques Cousteau’s televised adventures.
“When you’re a kid, you see this guy doing the job,” Ballesta explained. It was easy to imagine himself in Cousteau’s shoes, and Ballesta began exploring and documenting at a young age.
Living close to a sandy, cloudy swamp-like body of water that was by no means ideal for diving in Montpellier, France, Ballesta and his brother seized the opportunity provided by their proximity to water to imitate the adventures they watched through the television.
“It was enough to give us — my brother and me — the opportunity to play what we saw on the TV,” Ballesta said. “We played Commandant Cousteau all the time; I was the Commandant Cousteau and I was exploring. It was just a few crabs and a few octopus, that was enough for us: the feeling of being with whales and sharks.”
He recalled recounting his adventures to others, only to be met with disbelief. Determined to make people understand what he experienced, he took up underwater photography as a way of documenting his encounters with the underwater world.
Ballesta grew up to become an underwater photographer, National Geographic Explorer, and deep sea diver. Closing the Week Eight theme of “Water: Crisis, Beauty and Necessity,” Ballesta is set to deliver a lecture about his expeditions at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.
Ballesta has won Wildlife Photographer of the Year, awarded by the National Museum of London, six times. In the past 40 years, he’s first photographer to receive the competition’s Grand Title twice, in 2021 and 2023. During his lecture, Ballesta plans to discuss his ventures underwater and his scientific explorations. He will provide overviews of a selection of dives he has embarked upon, and will explain how each one went and their respective scientific outcomes.
Ballesta said he is interested in novelty over beauty when it comes to exploration. While many divers, he said, flock to well-known places to try and find something new, Ballesta prefers to go where no one has gone before in search of new scientific discoveries. At Andromède Océanologie, Ballesta is co-director of, and leads, the Gombessa Expeditions, which are aimed at solving a scientific mystery, carrying out extreme dives, and collecting new and unique images, according to its website.
It’s important to Ballesta that expeditions have a research question or goal, rather than diving solely for the sake of diving. He believes that it is imperative to have a scientific mission at the forefront of a dive in order to advance research of the oceans.
“In front of the unknown,” he said, “you need to stay calm, and the best way is to have a scientific approach to the mystery. That’s what we try every expedition — even if it’s exciting, even if it’s fascinating, we start first (with) a scientific protocol that we execute, and to have right answers by the end … The very important point for me is the promise of new wildlife images. That’s important; it cannot be just a diving challenge.”
He said he hopes to show Chautauquans how exciting his profession is and to impart an understanding that there is still beauty in even the most heavily-explored places.
“It’s to show that there are still some unbelievable pristine places, even in places where (the world) thinks that it’s done,” he said. “I’m going to show (the audience) that there are still some places with a huge level of biodiversity. There are still a lot of things to understand in the water, and I’m going to focus on this idea that I think the mysteries of the underwater world are a much more successful key to make people aware than just the beauty.”
