- Who
- Louis Marie Auguste Boutan
- What
- first first
- Where
- France ()
- When
- 1
The first portrait photograph taken underwater – with the camera and photographer in the water at the same time – was exposed in 1899. It was invented by French Zoologist Louis Marie Auguste Boutan in 1893. His underwater camera had to wait another six years for him to invent an underwater flash unit that allowed this first true portrait photograph of a recognisable diver subject. The subject in the photograph is Romanian oceanographer and biologist Emil Racovitza, and it was taken during a dive in Banyuls-sur-Mer in the South of France. Even illuminated by a magnesium lamp powered by oxygen from a barrel on which the flash head sat, the reported exposure time was still 30 minutes.
