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
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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