Nanna Kreutzmann
Award-winning photojournalist, documentary photographer and freediver creating long-term visual stories above and below the surface.
About Nanna
Nanna Kreutzmann is an award-winning Danish freelance photojournalist, documentary photographer and underwater photographer. She was educated as a photojournalist at the Danish School of Journalism and continues to work on assignments and long-term personal documentary projects.
For years, Nanna documented conflicts, disasters and major world events for international news media. After years of photographing wars, tsunamis, earthquakes and revolutions, she reached a point where that work had become too heavy. Freediving and underwater photography became a very different photographic space — quieter, slower and more personal.
Nanna creates her underwater images while freediving, working on a single breath with only the air she takes in at the surface. That way of working gives her photography a distinctive rhythm and allows her to move through the water with very little disturbance.
She describes herself as a slow traveller and has made the world her working field, driven by meeting local people and documenting the environments that surround them. Over time, her deep fascination with the ocean — and concern for the environment — has become an important part of her photographic work.
The documentary Under the Sea follows Nanna’s transition from conflict photography into freediving and underwater photography, and the sense of peace and community she found beneath the surface. The film had its world premiere at CPH:DOX in 2022.
As a long-time underwater photographer, I can say that there are not many underwater photographers whose work I have personally chosen to hang on my wall. But I actually have one of Nanna’s photographs hanging in my office.
— Lars Kirkegaard
Nanna has used a Fuji mirrorless camera in a Nauticam housing with a 180 mm glass dome.
