FLOOD | Page 42

What have you learned from shooting sharks that you can bring to the larger sharks? Is it even possible to fully comprehend just how big other parts of your photography career? and fast they are? Patience—a lot of patience. There’s a lot of time spent at sea waiting for That first trip with Great Whites, a shark went by the cage and in the animal. You’ve always got to be ready and prepared. Sometimes in the my head I thought he was going around the cage’s back. Before the studio [a subject] will do something and if your finger isn’t on the button thought was even finished the thing was right back in front of me. It and you’re not ready, you’ll miss the shot. You’ll miss the moment. So, it’s showed me how powerful and fast that seventeen-foot shark was. It good training for that. But when you’re sitting underwater while a big blew my mind. SUV with teeth goes by, it’s hard to get impressed by any human. It sort of keeps me in that headspace, too, which I think is always good. You really get a sense of their size when you’re underneath them and they swim over the top of you, and you see their girth and the belly and I’d imagine it’s a feeling you don’t necessarily get from seeing your the thickness. It’s like an SUV-and-a-half with teeth going by you. It’s photographs in a book or on a billboard. hard to explain. When you swim without a cage, you’ve got to swim directly at a shark. Your mind is telling you to swim the other way, but Early on, I was guilty of wanting [people] to respect me by having that [doing that you would] become prey instead of the predator. It goes billboard or shooting that album cover, and I learned quickly that if you go against your make-up. for that, it’s never enough. It’s a god-shaped hole and no book, no photo, no album will fill it. And believe me, I tried for years. I know it sounds so 40 See? “When a person is insane...” So now, looking back on your own new-agey but the fact is that truth has been around since the beginning of life, can you identify what made you into the person who can keep time. You can’t look to those things to make you or to define you. Even this cool in an environment like that? book doesn’t define me. It’s a diary of a portion of my life. I think it’s a sum of all my experiences in life. From putting my body But [photographing sharks] is something I’m very passionate about. I love through what I did with snowboarding, traversing steep crevices in those creatures. I love our planet. I love my kids, and I want them to see Europe, and triathlons, to living in Harlem in the ’90s and being the what’s on our planet. Our species is doing a lot of damage to it, so I felt only white guy there—[hence] “White Mike”—I’ve been in a lot of the responsibility to take my gift of photography [and share]. People always rough neighborhoods. Fear is something you’ve got to face. People ask Paul Watson, the Greenpeace founder who started Sea Shepherd and animals will smell it on you. I’m not one to be timid, and that’s [Conservation Society], “What are you gonna do about this?” And he always what got me on that first shark trip. And, like the acronym goes, says, “What are you gonna do about it?” That has always resonated with me. “False Evidence Appearing Real”: it’s so true with sharks. There’s a So I think at that moment, I said, “What am I gonna do? I’m gonna take bunch of false evidence that seems real until you see it. photos.” And that’s what I’ve done and what I’ll continue to do. F LO O D All Images ©Sharks: Face-to-Face with the Ocean’s Endangered Predator by Michael Muller / TASCHEN image distribution by CPi-syndication. Essay Contributors Philippe Cousteau, Jr., Dr. Alison Kock, Arty Nelson. Hardcover with foldouts, 11.0 x 14.6 in., 3