Picture of His Life

Photo by Yonatin Nir

I first met the underwater photographer Amos Nachoum in 2006, when we worked together on a story about West Caicos for Sport Diver magazine. The 6,000-acre island, home to one of Turks and Caicos’s best scuba-diving sites, was being transformed into a private resort community and hotel that was never completed, thanks to Lehman Brothers’s collapse two years later. But the project did get far enough underway to cut through the island's pristine reef so the developer could build a marina, which was never completed either.

I camped beside the half-built dock, so I could explore the underwater coast at night, and nearly got lost when I started following a cuttlefish into the deep, where the water quickly descends to 7,000 feet. But Amos took a different approach. One morning, a guide accompanied him to Lake Catherine, a 500-acre saline reserve on West Caicos, so he could photograph the resident throngs of roseate flamingoes just as the sun was coming up. Then when the outing was complete, Amos advised him to be ready the following morning, too. “Didn’t we just do this?” the guide asked. “Yes,” said Amos, who had served in Israel’s special forces before moving to the United States. “But that was reconnaissance and practice.”

Amos’s specialty is photographing big animals, so it’s not surprising that his adventure site—where you can sign up to join him on marine- and land-based photography expeditions for sperm whales, orcas, anacondas, crocodiles and the like—is BigAnimals.com. But another way to get to know Amos that doesn’t involve quite as much effort is to watch the 2019 documentary about his journey to photograph polar bears underwater in the Canadian Arctic. It’s called Picture of His Life.