IMAGES ©BRIAN SKERRY / brianskerry.

com

O cean Advocate

©STEVE DE NEEF
“There’s nothing as
frightening as seeing
firsthand what
mankind has done to
the oceans over just
the four last decades
I’ve been diving.”
—BRIAN SKERRY

Brian Skerry works to

conserve aquatic environments

By Robert Kiener

76 PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER PPMAG.COM AUGUST 2020 77

 rian Skerry’s been there, done that. One of the world’s best known underwater photographers, Skerry is a longtime National Geographic
magazine contributor as well as an author, a lecturer, and the winner of a boatload of prestigious photography awards and accolades.
Perched on a stool in his coastal Maine office and studio, the 58-year-old quickly reels off a list of the challenges of his profession.
“Let’s see; you’re working in an alien—always cold—environment, you need life support equipment, and it can be dan-
gerous,” he says. His blue eyes light up, and without taking a pause he continues, “You have to get very close—within several
feet—to your subjects because the water is filled with particles and acts like a giant filter and reflects, refracts, and scatters light.
Water also removes colors and makes everything monochromatic the deeper you go. Also, because your camera has to go in a housing, you
cannot change lenses, film, or media cards underwater. You have to use whatever you jumped into the water with. For example, if I’m shooting
with a macro lens and a whale swims by, I’m out of luck.”
He smiles, takes a deep breath and adds, “My terrestrial counterparts may be able to sit in a camouflage blind and wait for a month for some
elusive animal to wander by, and they can then shoot a picture with a 600mm lens, but we underwater photographers have to get in the water,
get up close, and get our picture—and do all that within an hour. It’s a challenge.”

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 He pauses. “But what a chal-
lenge! That’s what I love about it.
There’s nothing like it!”
PERIL BELOW
Dangerous. Skerry did mention
that underwater photography can
be just that, but he’s not one to
dwell on the potential hazards of
the profession. Probe a bit more,
and he’ll explain that he has had
some frightening moments dur-
ing his nearly four decades and
more than 10,000 hours of under-
water photography. For example,
while shooting off the southwest-
ern coast of Ireland for a National
Geographic assignment, he and
an assistant emerged from their
dive to see they’d surfaced far
away from their dive boat.
“We could see the boat, but be-
cause there was such a strong
current we couldn’t swim to it.
In fact, the current was sweeping
us out to sea,” he remembers.
Skerry and his assistant began
yelling at the boat, but the crew
couldn’t hear them over the
noise of the engines. “Even worse,”
says Skerry, “the sun was at our
back and there was a lot of glare
and big swells, so that made it even
harder for the crew to see us.” The
pair kept yelling but the powerful
current continued to sweep them
farther and farther out to sea.
They inflated and waved 4-foot
long, bright orange submersible
80 PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER
marker buoys above their heads.
Still, they weren’t spotted.
“You go through a range or emo-
tions in a situation like that,” says
Skerry. “First, you laugh and think,
Those idiots can’t see us. Then
you get angry and think, What’s
wrong with them? Can’t they just
follow the drift and locate us?’’
As the dive boat became small-
er and smaller in the distance,
Skerry and his assistant hooked
themselves together by their
dive belts so they would drift to-
gether. Eventually, they spotted
a rescue helicopter. But their
hearts sank when they realized
the rescuers couldn’t see them.
After an hour or so of moving
ever farther into the cold Atlantic,
Skerry began thinking of the 4-
week-old daughter he’d left behind
for this trip. “Dark thoughts began
popping into my head,” he says.
Skerry and his companion
were two and a half hours adrift
when an Irish fishing boat cap-
tain, who had heard of the miss-
ing pair on his maritime radio,
spotted and rescued them. Since
then, Skerry carries a two-way
radio, a GPS monitor, and strobe
lights when he dives.
“The afternoon off Ireland also
taught me a good lesson about
this profession,” says Skerry.
“Uncertainty is a given. So be
prepared and never give up.”
Another close call: “I was doing
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 It was grim statistics like these
that compelled Skerry and other
like-minded photographers to
found the International League
of Conservation Photographers
in 2005. “I realized I had this
unique opportunity, after I’d be-
come a contributor to National
Geographic magazine, to alert their
audience of 50 million to the dif-
ferent environmental factors that
are endangering our oceans,”
says Skerry. “There were articles
about conservation on land, but
there was very little about the
need to save the oceans. I felt a
sense of urgency and a duty to
change that.” Happily, the editors
at National Geographic agreed, and
he began producing stories with
a heavy environmental slant.
been named one of National Geo-
graphic magazine’s “50 Greatest
Photographs of All Time.”
Writer Gregory Stone is a long-
time collaborator with Skerry.
“Brian has that rare ability to
make pictures that interpret
subjects in new ways—pictures
that show far more than simply
where and what was happening,
also including the true nature of
the moment, the ethereal, almost
spiritual, aspect of his subject,”
Stone notes in Skerry’s book
“Ocean Soul.”
Fellow photographer David
Doubilet says, “Brian Skerry’s
photography is many things: It
is impactful, influential, and it is
critical to conservation because
it makes a difference. I am proud
to call him a colleague, friend,
and fellow ocean advocate. The
planet needs more like him.”
In addition to “Ocean Soul,”
Skerry has published 10 oth-
er well-received books. He is
an 11-time award winner in the
Wildlife Photographer of the
Year competition and is the only
photographer to win the Peter
Benchley Award for Excellence
in Media. A frequent lecturer on
photography, exploration, and
conservation, Skerry has spoken
about the importance of pro-
tecting the oceans at the United
Nations General Assembly, the
Royal Geographic Society in Lon-
don, and at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Despite his successes and acco-
lades, Skerry is quick to explain,
“Like an athlete I am only as good
as my last game, or in my case,
my last assignment. Failure is
not an option. I know that if I fail
to deliver the goods, I’m done.
So I always have to be prepared
for inevitable problems such as
bad weather, poor visibility, or
the animals I hope to shoot not
turning up. It’s all part of the
challenge. But like I said, there’s
nothing like it!” •
Robert Kiener is a writer in Vermont.

another story for National Geo-
graphic about harp seals. I was
diving under the ice in Canada’s
Gulf of St. Lawrence and was so
entranced by a big male harp seal
that I was stalking him with my
camera. Before long, I realized
the ice above me had shifted, and
I couldn’t find my entry hole. It
had closed up. That was scary.
The water was 29 degrees, you
only have the air on your back,
and if you panic and start breath-
ing heavy, it’s all over.” He found
another exit hole just in time.
BECOMING A
CONSERVATIONIST
Skerry has been attacked by a
giant Humboldt squid, chased
by a massive sperm whale, had
decompression sickness, and
been “nipped” by various sharks.
“When I see a shark out in the
blue void, I’m often praying that
it’ll come close enough for me to
capture an image. But sometimes
as they approach, my heart will
start to race and I’ll wonder what
I’ve gotten myself into.”
But the biggest underwater
scare Skerry’s ever had is man-
made, he says. “There’s nothing
as frightening as seeing firsthand
what mankind has done to the
oceans over just the four last de-
cades I’ve been diving.”
When Skerry started diving in
the late 1970s he was bowled over
by the colorful fish and coral he
explored and eventually pho-
tographed. “I remember when
I was a kid diving off the coasts
of Massachusetts and Maine I’d
often see big, teeming schools
of baby fish such as pollock,
herring, and cod. Those huge
schools of fish thrilled me as I
swam through them.”
Two decades later those fish
had mostly disappeared. “The
more I traveled, the more I ex-
plored the oceans, the more envi-
ronmental damage I came across,”
says Skerry who landed his first
National Geographic assignment in
1998. Plastic pollution is every-
where. Coral reefs are disappear-
ing. Oceans are acidifying. The
numbers are terrifying. Every
year 18 billion pounds of plastic
waste enter the world’s oceans.
In the past 30 years 50 percent of
the world’s coral reefs have died.
Thanks largely to overfishing,
90 percent of the big fish, such
as Atlantic salmon, tuna, halibut
and swordfish, have disappeared
from the world’s oceans in just
half a century. More than 100
million sharks a year are killed,
many just for their fins. As the
Washington Post has noted, “If we
don’t allow for proper recovery,
these fish risk total extinction.”
ENGAGING IMAGES
The greatest challenge of conser-
vation photography, says Skerry,
is engaging the reader. To under-
stand the science behind a story,
he spends months researching
an article idea before submitting
it to his editors. However, while
it is easy to fill an article with
information about the impor-
tance of conservation, a photog-
rapher has to create images that
resonate with people and also tell
a story. “Humans are very visual
creatures,” says Skerry, “and we
respond emotionally and viscer-
ally to powerful pictures.”
He’s become world-famous
for his evocative, iconic images
and explains, “What I am really
trying to do is capture the poetry
that lives in the sea.” To illustrate
an article on the slaughter of
sharks, he wanted to produce a
picture that would disprove the
notion that sharks are villains.
On a dive in Mexico’s Sea of Cor-
tez he stumbled across a bigeye
thresher shark that had just died
in a gill net. “It looked to me like
a crucifixion,” says Skerry, “so I
framed it that way” (page 79, top
right). The striking image has

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