Seascape Photography

Seascape photos are a genre of marine art. They can depict anything from leisurely sea excursions to people at work on boats, or it may just show the sea alone.

When photography was first invented, seascape photos were especially difficult and unheard of because it was impossible to achieve proper exposure of both landscape and sky in a single picture. In the mid-1850s, French photographer Gustave Le Gray solved this problem by printing two negatives on a single sheet of paper, thereby creating the first successful photograph seascape.

Le Gray's seascape photographs and their ability to capture a poetic mood unlike photography ever had before are partly responsible for photography finally being considered a fine art. Today, some of Gustave Le Gray's seascapes can be seen at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Quick Facts

• Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Seascapes," three gelatin silver prints, sold at Christie's New York in October 2008 for $110,500
• Gustave Le Gray's seascape "Le Vague Brisée, Mer Méditerranée No 15" sold at Sotheby's New York in December of 2014 for $245,000
• Gustave Le Gray's seascape photographs were sometimes made up of two negatives from separate occasions or different locations