Background
Jonathan Blair was born on January 25, 1941 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States.
Jonathan Blair was born on January 25, 1941 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States.
Blair studied at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (1961-63), then (1965) earned a BFA in Photographic Illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, where he studied under Minor White.
Jonathan Blair began his photography career at Northwestern University where he took pictures of various stars. Later in life, he went on a trip to White Sands, New Mexico on which he realized his dream of being a landscape photographer. Soon after that, he got enrolled into RIT to pursue his degree in illustrative photography.
Since 1968 Jonathan Blair has been a contract photographer for National Geographic Society, and since 1979 has been a guest lecturer at Maine Photographic Workshop. Jonathan Blair also lectured in 1979 at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, and at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. In 1963 he was a park photographer at Yosemite National Park and a staff photographer at Dearborn Observatory, Northwestern University. During those times he published many photographs for the United States Department of the Interior which earned him bachelor's degree in fine arts and photography.
Jonathan Blair became an intern for the National Geographic magazine and have participated in numerous expeditions to Africa, Asia Minor, and Europe. Since 1970s he have published numerous articles with photographs in that magazine including The Last Dive of I-52, an underwater story, which he wrote after he took 17,000 feet (5,200 m) dive in the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2001, he became the Director of Media Development for Nauticos Corporation, an ocean discovery company. His first assignment with them was taking underwater images during their search for Amelia Earhart's airplane.