One Photographer’s Quest to Redefine the Shark

I expected to meet a dreaded “man-eater,” but when I saw it, I realized that it was a defenseless animal, more afraid of me than I was of it. That moment aroused my curiosity, and I decided to learn more about sharks. I travelled to the island of Guadalupe off the Pacific coast of Mexico to see great white sharks, and I took a small point-and-shoot camera with me. When I managed to photograph a great white shark, I realized that the camera was more than a tool, it was a means to reach my goal of meeting sharks.

The movies have reduced sharks to one or two descriptions for many people: They are terrifying and insatiable. What do you learn from being with them and why do you defend them?

From a very young age I dreamed of being a diver because my parents were divers. While my mother died when I was only one year old, my dad used to tell about me his adventures with sharks. He said they were bad. When I was seven I saw the movie Jaws, and I was drawn to the character Matt Hooper, the scientist. At the end, when the shark destroys the boat, Hooper gets into a cage, the shark breaks it and everyone assumes he must have been eaten, but in the end, he survives. Soon after seeing the film, we went to a beach in Tuxpan, in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz. My dad bought a little dead shark from a fisherman, and I played with it on the beach with my half-brothers. Those moments led to my love for sharks. For me, living alongside animals is my safe space. It is then that I feel calm, when I’m truly myself. I feel free, at ease.

WIRED has covered how overfishing has reached the deep seas, threatening rays and sharks. In your 20 years of encounters with these creatures, have you seen changes in their populations, and what is it like to witness first-hand the impact on our oceans?

I have seen two phenomena. Without going too far from my home, near the island of Cozumel, off the coast of the Riviera Maya in the Caribbean, there was once more life than there is now. But I have also seen places like Cabo Pulmo, at the tip of Baja California, where 20 years ago there were almost no sharks, and now it is teeming with them. When sharks are present naturally, without someone supporting the population and feeding them, it’s a sign that the ecosystem is healthy. In Cabo Pulmo they have created protected areas that have become points of hope. There are not enough of these areas, but there you can find the whole food chain, from sharks to the smallest plankton. When you take away the sharks, the entire ecosystem becomes unbalanced.

Lately, I have seen more and more dead and bleached coral, and it’s very sad.

What does that look like?