Fear. 

I am a fan of fear. That is, the right kind, the energizing kind. I like to be scared when embarking on a new project. For me, a healthy dose of fear stimulates creativity. Will the concept even work? Can I pull off something that I don’t think others have done before, possibly with good reason? 

In April 2023, after months of testing at home in California, I arrived in Fiji, ready to find out.

We were based outside Savusavu, a small town on the island of Vanua Levu. One kilometer from the shore lay an area of ocean floor: a field of broken coral fragments spread far and wide. This destruction had been caused in 2016 by Cyclone Winston, its power intensified by climate change. I don’t think that I fully understood until then just how much damage that cyclones could inflict under the ocean surface, smashing the delicate coral into millions of pieces.

We called the location the Boneyard. It would be our underwater studio for the next six weeks.

At just 2-4 meters depth, depending on the tide, it made shooting as safe as possible for the ‘cast’, and, in theory, meant that the ocean surface could be seen just over their heads.

So who was going to be relaxed enough to be photographed here? The project would live or die based on the local Fijian people I would be photographing (whom I will refer to as the cast).

In the first two chapters, all the people photographed had already been impacted by climate change - losing their homes, land or livelihood, or all of these. However, these Fijians - all living by or close to the ocean - would be representatives of those people who in coming decades will lose their homes, land and livelihoods due to rising oceans

We probably auditioned as many as two hundred people from the local communities. At each casting session, they were asked to open their eyes, hold their breath underwater while casting photos were taken. Those people that looked like they would be sufficiently relaxed then had to undergo and pass a Scuba Discover training course with our divemaster team.

Our first shoot day was a wake-up call. The first three cast - Akessa, Maria and Joe - were swaying uncontrollably with each surge due to insufficient weights to keep them steady. Their arms and legs floated upwards. Their whole bodies looked blown to the left and right. Even the heavily weighted furniture was drifting. We quickly emptied out the town’s store of all its remaining 5 and 10 kilo barbells. We bought, begged and borrowed every 2 pound dive belt weight we could get our hands on.

Once everyone was more weighted, weights concealed in often quite ingenious ways, we got back to work. We had a clear step by step process:

Obviously it was very complicated to make adjustments underwater, so I would take a reference photo on land for everyone to understand the plan before we went down.

At the location, 4 meter square frames were constructed with fabric to float on the surface above us and provide soft shade. (As always, I don’t like sunlight in my photos unless very low in the sky.) Each cast member would be brought down by their own safety divemaster, sharing oxygen from his tank. Once in position, the cast switched regulators to breathe through their own air source. 

A few of us communicated underwater via hardwired comms (the yellow and blue ropes you can see in the photos) and to crew on the boat, who would relay my directions to the cast via an underwater speaker. 

When everyone was ready, the cast removed their masks, took a deep breath, removed their regulators and handed them to their safety divemasters, who would swim out of frame as fast as possible. I would begin photographing while they held their breath……

I had just seconds, but over the course of the weeks of the shoot, their breath-holding times became longer and longer, they relaxed still more, and they grew even more natural and self-assured.

And in those precious seconds, to me they looked like, in the best moments, they had been sitting there for eons, contemplating their lives, their futures, their mortality.

…and then, when the moment arrived that they felt the need for air, they would reach out their hand and their divemaster would quickly swim back in and hand them back their regulator. 

As the shoot progressed, I kept photographing the same dozen or so people. I had originally planned to photograph far more people, and more of the older generation. But generally the younger cast were the most relaxed underwater. All the girls were 18 years old and under, with the exception of Maria and Christine. There was something about these younger faces that moved me, perhaps to do with the fact that this generation will more dramatically bear the consequences of the inactions of older generations from other continents before them.

People ask me what the greatest challenge was on this shoot. As always it was not the cast. And in the end, nor was it the logistics. No, it was the elements. It’s always the elements. Conditions outside my control. On every previous shoot, it’s the weather that causes the biggest problems. Usually it’s the sunlight while I wait and wait for a cavalry of clouds to come to the rescue. And in the case of the first two chapters of The Day May Break, it’s also the wind, blowing away all trace of fog.

But on this shoot, it was an entirely new form of challenge. This time, it was week after week of terrible visibility. I chose to shoot in April and May: in theory, after the rainy season, but before the water got too cold in the southern hemisphere winter. In theory, the amount of plankton in the water was meant to be reducing in intensity, creating more clear water.

In reality, the opposite happened. As the shoot progressed towards May, the visibility actually got worse and worse. There was one period in May where the visibility was so bad that we were unable to shoot for nine long, expensive days. An unseasonably massive torrential storm generated a huge amount of muddy freshwater runoff from the island’s rivers. The ocean water just got greener and greener until it looked like we were swimming in a fetid stagnant pond in the middle of a jungle. Totally un-shootable, and it only ever really cleared up on, of course, the final morning of the shoot. In total over the six weeks, we had just two mornings of genuinely good visibility. 

But then, out of misfortune, out of a problem, as so often happens, serendipity, something better presents itself. In this instance, after those nine lost days, we started scouting further along the coast for another location that might also have broken coral at 2-4 meters deep, even though logically, the visibility would be bad everywhere within the radius of a one hour boat ride.