Shark Encounter Transforms Photographer's View of Nature

Maldives overview

In 2021, off the island of Fuvahmulah in the Maldives, photographer Matt Porteous was on the sea floor as a three-and-a-half-metre tiger shark passed directly over him. He surfaced, he says, a different person. "My life changed forever. I'd never experienced wildlife like that. I hadn't experienced nature like that." He has spent much of the time since trying, and largely failing, to put language around the viscerality of the experience. "I speak to people about this connection they have with nature, and no one can really explain it. It's almost like we haven't got a word for it in English."

Important details from the source

• In 2021, off the island of Fuvahmulah in the Maldives, photographer Matt Porteous was on the sea floor as a three-and-a-half-metre tiger shark passed directly over him.
• I hadn't experienced nature like that." He has spent much of the time since trying, and largely failing, to put language around the viscerality of the experience.
• "I speak to people about this connection they have with nature, and no one can really explain it.
• It's almost like we haven't got a word for it in English.".
• Porteous, who has photographed the British royal family, co-founded the storytelling collective Ocean Culture Life in 2019 with Tamsin Raine, a former advertising executive turned ocean advocate.
• Both grew up on Jersey — Porteous surfing after school, Raine "never more than ten minutes from the sea." Neither has much patience for the standard conservation pitch of charts, statistics and a slow drip of bad news.
• "We don't respond to fear very well as humans," Raine says.
• "How can we possibly feel like we're going to be part of positive change if that's all we're learning and listening to?".
• The ocean, in her description, is "the heartbeat of our planet," regulating the climate, helping produce the oxygen we breathe, invisibly enough that most people never think about it until they're made to.
• "I can tell you every day that the ocean generates the oxygen you breathe," she says, "but you're not really going to swallow that until you feel it for yourself.".

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