Zena Holloway
Reknown for her extraordinary magical imagery, Zena Holloway is an artist who has taken humanity and the etherial into the underworld to new watery depths.
Born in 1973, this daughter of an airline pilot found inspiration to work underwater behind a camera at the age of 18 while on a diving holiday in Egypt.
Tags & Taxonomy
She became enamored with the underwater realm and eventually came to work abroad as a SCUBA instructor and underwater videographer for several years. She returned to London in 1995 to work as an underwater photographer.
Totally self-taught, Holloway has immersed herself in highly technical aspects of underwater photography and carved out a place in the competitive world of photography and advertising. Initially, work was hard to come by, said Holloway, and she nearly dropped the whole thing on more than one occasion. But a stubborn spirit refused to let her give up, and she finally received her first commission from Faberge in 1997.
Thereafter, she received a steady stream of commissions for both commercials and print.
In the beginning, a lot of people told her it couldn’t be done, but specializing in underwater photography ended up playing an important role in her success as the market became saturated with stock photography and digital capture. Holloway managed to combine her two great loves—diving and photography—into one lucrative business.
Some of Holloway’s clients include Nike (Next big thing), Herbal Essences (Leo Burnett), Umbro (Exposure), Olay (Saatchi & Saatchi NY), Vogue (Joshua), Bounty (Publicis NY), Jacuzzi (Y&R San Fran), Greenpeace (Saatchi & Saatchi), Dolland & Aitchison (DFGW), Elastoplast (TBWA), Toto (Steele +), Sony (TBWA), EMI/Parlaphone, GlaxoSmithKline (Ogilvy), Epson (Burkitt DDB), Unibanco (Bates), National Geographic, BBC, Ploydor, The Body Shop, Sunday Times, Dazed and Confused, How to Spend it.
She has collected quite a few awards over the years including the International Photography Awards in which she placed second in both the Advertising Beauty category and the Fine Art Nude category in 2006. She got on the shortlist of the Fashion & Beauty category of the AoP awards for her “Angel” series, which also won the Fashion & Beauty category of the Applied Arts Photography Awards in 2006.
In 2005, her work was chosen for the IV Moscow International Festival Gold Dolphin photography section, and in 2003, she won an Honorable Mention in the Nikon International Photo Contest. (...)
Download the full article ⬇︎
Originally published
X-Ray Mag #19
FIJI: Scott Bennett went to the far side of the Pacific and got the Royal treatment. Red Sea: Wreck hunter and author Peter Collings shows what all the latest craze is all about.
Our Norwegian friends takes us for spin in Saltstraumen, the most powerful drift dive on the planet - so buckle up.
Find out where all the noise in the Ocean come from and check out the Fall dive fashion before we go visit SeaCam and have a talk with Harald Hordosch about what it takes to become successful. Cerdic Verdier explains how to Bail out on a rebreather.
And finally Michel Ribera takes on a very spooky dive in the Parisian Netherworld - come see what the Catacombs hold. The Grande finale is presented by Zena Holloway - some amazing photography there.
