Before the reef and after the reef, there is the horizon. The BVI is a place where the sea and the sky do most of the work, and the photographer’s job is mainly to be there at the right hour with a lens wide enough to hold it all. Armando understood this. For every underwater photograph he took, there are several from the deck of a boat, a beach, a ridge.

Some mornings the sun comes up through the notch between Tortola and Virgin Gorda and fills the channel with gold. Some evenings it sets behind Jost Van Dyke and turns the water the color of a bruise, anchored boats becoming silhouettes. The squalls blow through in afternoon lines you can see an hour before they arrive, walls of rain moving across the water at the pace of a walking man, with clear sky on either side.

A seascape is not nothing happening. It is everything happening at once — light, water, wind, cloud, land — all of it shifting in the minutes you have to frame a shot. These are pictures of a place at rest, before and after the diving. The BVI Armando loved, seen from where it can be held whole.

The islands themselves are part of every picture. The long flat curve of Anegada, so low that sailors see the palm trees before the land. The cliffs of Sage Mountain rising above a boat at anchor. The boulder fields at The Baths, the white arc of Sandy Spit, the mangroves at Trellis Bay at low tide with the roots exposed like the ribs of something older than memory.