Sharks Finally Get the Glamour Shots They Deserve

Michael Muller had spent decades photographing the world’s most recognizable celebrities when, in 2007, his wife booked them a trip to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, and he finally got the chance to photograph his dream subject: sharks.

“The first time I locked eyes with that first great white, I was hooked,” Muller said. 

Muller was determined to keep photographing sharks after that, but he knew he wouldn’t be content capturing them the way wildlife photographers typically did—that is, with mostly natural light or perhaps with one or two strobes mounted on the camera housing. He wanted to photograph sharks the way he photographed celebrities. Since it would be impossible to bring the giant fish to a studio, he decided he would have to bring a studio to the ocean. 

On his next shark photography expedition, a 2009 campaign for the luxury watch brand IWC Schaffhausen shot at the Galápagos Islands over the course of a week, he brought custom-made 1,200-watt underwater studio strobe lights—the strongest lights of their kind ever built—and connected them to batteries aboard the 40-foot boat by cables up to 140 feet long. The crew of 15 traveled more than 1,200 miles, and Muller dove four times a day among hundreds of sharks with his team of assistants. 

Since then, on more than 30 self-funded expeditions around the world, Muller has proven himself a uniquely driven and visionary photographer of some of the ocean’s most fascinating inhabitants and an outspoken advocate for their protection. His book, Michael Muller: Sharks, Face-to-Face with the Ocean’s Endangered Predator, which Taschen published in March, is at once a love letter and a call to action.

Television and movie portrayals may have given sharks a notorious reputation, but in reality, an average of less than five fatal shark attacks occurred worldwide between 2006 and 2010. Muller, for one, isn’t scared of them, which is why, with the guidance of Shark Explorers’ Morne Hardenberg, he stopped shooting from inside a cage. Every once in a while, he said, he has to “give them a little bump here and there” with his camera when they get too curious, but largely, sharks leave him alone.

“We’re not really on their menu,” Muller said. “Once you see them, you quickly realize they’re not these killing machines we’re so programmed to think we are. They’re more scared of us than we are of them.”

Sharks have good reasons to fear humans. An estimated 100 million die by human hands every year, caught in nets accidentally or targeted intentionally for meat, fins, and other parts. The threat to shark populations is a threat to the entire ecosystems. Part of Muller’s mission, as a result, is to make photos that help change attitudes so that sharks are more widely seen as victims in need of care than killers deserving of scorn.

“Encouragingly, attitudes are changing and many people have a growing fascination and appreciation for sharks. Ordinary people have started to describe sharks as ‘beautiful,’ ‘intelligent,’ and ‘threatened,’ and this gives us hope for the future,” wrote marine biologist Alison Kock in an essay for the book.