Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia, 1997

A school of fish swims over a coral formation in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. Like a few grains of rice sprinkled on a sea of blue, the French territory in the South Pacific is a paltry 1,359 square miles (3,520 square kilometers) of land scattered over one million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers) of ocean, an area as large as Western Europe.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Black Pearls of French Polynesia," June 1997, National Geographic magazine)

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