The lady and the sea
Scientist, photographer, activist – SeaLegacy co-founder Cristina Mittermeier is using everything she’s got to help save our oceans.
As a young girl growing up in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, Cristina Mittermeier knew she wanted to live a life that helped protect the natural world. First she became a marine biologist. Then she was asked to provide the text for a coffee table book. But when she saw how people connected
with the photos and barely glanced at her words on launch night, she wondered if she was going about it the wrong way.
“That was the first
‘Eureka!’ moment when I thought maybe I should lower the price of entry to reach people through something that’s not intimidating, not confrontational and not guilt ridden. And use photography,” she says.
At the time Cristina had never held a camera. Then when the Houston Museum of Natural Science chose the photos she took on her ex-husband’s camera for an exhibition – and accidentally gave him the credit – she knew she was onto something.
Cristina went on to study Fine Art Photography at Corcoran College of the Arts in Washington, D.C, and has since become one of the world’s most influential photographers, with a string of awards and her work published in hundreds of magazines including National Geographic and TIME.
“Somebody early on in my career said to me,
‘The whole world has been photographed already: if you want to make your mark you have to find a way of showing the same thing that people have already seen so many times, in a different way’.
“The two images in the beginning of my career that were like ‘A-ha! I see what he meant!’ were Lady with the Goose, because that was such an unexpected photograph, and the boys with the bubble gum in the highlands of New Guinea. Because everyone photographed them so seriously, and they’re so fierce looking, but here were these boys popping bubble gum.”
The cover of Cristina’s book Amaze is her image Lady with the Goose. It may look like a surreal portrait, but was instead captured when Cristina was playing with a new single reflex camera in China’s Yunnan Province.
“I snapped literally three frames. On the other two the goose is panicking and then she passed in front of a dark storefront that gives it the perfect background. Of course, these were the days of film so I didn’t see for many weeks what had come out, and I was so surprised.”
In 2005, Cristina founded the International League of Conservation Photographers to provide a platform for photographers working on
environmental issues. “I would go to these all-white male photography events and raise my hand and say, ‘Hey, can we not use the images to try to protect these places?’ and the answer was ‘Shut up and sit down’. So I thought, ‘I’m going to start my own thing.’”
Nine years after launching the ILCP she founded SeaLegacy, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the ocean with her partner, Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen. This was followed in 2020 by Only One, a digital action hub for ocean conservation. Cristina says that once photography opens the door to the beauty and mystery of nature you can start to
To see more of Cristina’s work visit sealegacy.org and cristinamittermeier.com.
@mitty and @sealegacy talk about the issues and how we can solve them.
“You have to be able to give people agency. You have to be able to say, ‘Together we can sign a petition and get the prime minister or the premier to take action’. And it’s working. We have something like two million contactable names in our database, and we are routinely winning one campaign after another because the power of the people is greater than the people in power.”
Cristina says restoring the health and abundance of the ocean is critical to tackling climate change. “It’s the most important machine we have for the sequestration of carbon and heat from the atmosphere and the only way it can do it, is if it’s alive.”
With the amount of carbon that has already been released we may not have long to turn things around, but she’s still confident we can do it.
“When Martin Luther
King gave his famous speech for civil rights he didn’t say I have a nightmare, he told us what the dream was. And I think if we populate our mindset with a positive image of the future we want to live in, then it makes it a lot easier to take those actions.
“The personal decisions that we make every day actually matter. Every gram of carbon matters.”
As well as reducing our personal carbon footprint Cristina encourages people to use their voice to demand change, and says sometimes politicians need the public support to make the right move.
“Don’t despair. Don’t give into fear. Hopelessness is defeating. But hope is empowering.”