Inserting the Manfish: Hybridity in Underwater Memoir Illustrations

In the mid-twentieth century, humans began to go underwater with extraordinary new freedom. Although life writing, art and film had conveyed underwater life before, the development of underwater photography created exciting possibilities for visualization in texts. In underwater life writing, photographs play an important co-constituting role. The “life” represented is double: that of the underwater human, and the life of the sea and its inhabitants. I look at Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World (1953), a classic of underwater memoirs, and other memoirs by his close associates, to explore how the images create visual narrative which is also a narrative about visualities.