There are people who photograph what they see, and others who, through an image, try to change the way we see. Euan Rannachan belongs to the latter. For years, he has entered waters inhabited by great white sharks, bringing his camera within just a few metres of one of the most feared — and misunderstood — predators on the planet. But reducing his story to a question of courage would be far too simple.
His is, instead, a story of fascination, knowledge and respect. A passion that began in childhood and became a true calling in 2016, when, in the waters surrounding Guadalupe Island, he came face-to-face with a great white shark for the first time. Looking into its eyes changed the direction of his artistic journey.
A professional photographer for nearly twenty years, Rannachan has worked across advertising, sports, big-wave photography and creative direction. Yet underwater, he discovered a different visual language. His photographs are not searching for the monster that decades of cinema have taught us to fear; they are searching for the animal itself. Powerful, unpredictable, complex, and surprisingly far removed from the stereotype we have created around it.
Perhaps this is precisely what makes his work so compelling: Rannachan does not photograph sharks to show us how close he can get to them. He does it to bring us closer to them.
And that is where we want to begin.
1. Euan, the first time you looked a great white shark in the eye, you said something inside you changed. If you could return to that moment with the experience you have today, what would you see in those eyes that you were not yet able to understand back then?
That’s a really interesting question, because usually I’m asked whether I was terrified the first time I saw a great white shark. The truth is, I wasn’t. My fascination with these animals has always outweighed the fear.
The first time I saw one at Guadalupe, even before I got into the cage, I was simply in awe. Their size is almost impossible to understand until you see one in front of you. Guadalupe was such a special place because you could see very large sharks, often in incredible numbers, in water clarity unlike anywhere else. Every encounter felt almost like an out-of-body experience.
What I understand now, though, that I couldn’t have understood during that first encounter, is the effect these animals can have on people.
Over the years I was fortunate enough not only to spend countless hours around these sharks, but also to watch other people meet them for the first time. That became almost as meaningful to me as my own encounters.
Watching what happened to people afterward was incredible. Even if they never encountered another shark again, that one experience changed something in them. It changed the way they thought about sharks, but sometimes it also changed the way they thought about themselves.
I call it a rewiring of the brain.
You spend your life being told certain things are too frightening, too dangerous, or simply things you shouldn’t do. Then one day you’re sitting underwater with a great white shark in front of you, and not only are you okay, you realize that’s exactly where you want to be. Suddenly you start questioning some of the other limits you’ve accepted in your life.
It certainly did that to me. Eventually I uprooted my family, moved away from the rat race and into the hills, and began putting much more of my energy into the people and experiences that actually mattered to me.
I think life is really an accumulation of experiences that continually adjust our perspective. And from those changes come understanding, empathy and respect — some of the things I think make being human so extraordinary.
So if I could go back and look into the eyes of that first shark again, knowing everything I know today, I think what would be different is me. I’d understand that this animal was about to change far more than the way I saw sharks. It was going to change the way I saw my own life.
Today, when I think about looking into the eyes of a great white shark again, the overwhelming feeling isn’t fear. There’s certainly a healthy respect, and there always should be.
But more than anything, there’s gratitude.
2. Hollywood has turned the great white shark into one of the most universal symbols of fear. How difficult is it for a photograph to challenge an image that cinema has been constructing for decades?
It’s incredibly difficult. I’ve dedicated a lot of my work to trying to change the perception of white sharks, but I’ve also realized that it’s very difficult to completely change someone’s perception without that person actually seeing one for themselves.
The interesting thing is that I love Jaws. I love those movies. I’m an artist first and foremost, not a scientist, and I’ve never felt that changing the narrative around sharks means pretending they aren’t powerful or intimidating animals.
For me, that’s part of what makes them so extraordinary.
When you see a great white shark, you’re looking at an animal shaped by millions of years of evolution. It’s an apex predator that was doing what it does long before human beings were here. There’s something almost prehistoric about seeing one move through the water. I find that majestic rather than terrifying.
So I’m careful about telling people, “You shouldn’t be afraid of sharks.” I think the better word is respect.
What bothers me more is the idea that they’re mindless eating machines. Once you’ve spent enough time watching them in the wild, you realize there’s far more going on than people imagine. They’re inquisitive. They’re selective. Individual animals behave differently.
At the same time, I don’t want to swing the pendulum so far in the other direction that we start portraying great white sharks as puppies you can swim up to and hug. They’re not. They’re absolutely wild animals, and pretending otherwise does them just as much of a disservice.
That’s why I don’t shy away from photographs of sharks with their mouths open. A great white shark displaying its power and doing what an apex predator does isn’t something we should hide. I want to show the entire animal.
A friend told me years ago that because we’re among the relatively few people fortunate enough to spend significant time with these animals, we have an obligation to show people how we actually see them.
Sometimes that’s a shark with its mouth wide open. But most of the time it’s an incredibly sleek animal effortlessly gliding through blue water. Both are the great white shark.
Of course, the dramatic image is usually the one people want to see. Social media, television and entertainment reward spectacle and fear because fear gets people’s attention.
My work isn’t really about teaching people a scientific lesson. I’m a photographer, not a marine biologist. What I can show people is what I’ve actually witnessed.
I’ve sat in front of great white sharks with their mouths open countless times and I’m still here. That doesn’t mean there is no danger. It means the danger needs to be understood in context.
People sometimes ask why I stayed inside a cage at Guadalupe if I believe sharks aren’t mindless killers. My answer is simple: because we were deliberately going to a place where these animals feed. They’re curious, they’re investigating their environment, and some may be there specifically because they’re hungry.
Why would I put myself in a situation where an animal could simply make a mistake?
A great white doesn’t need to “want to eat me” to seriously injure me. Humans simply aren’t built to withstand even an exploratory bite from an animal of that size. And if that happened, I wouldn’t blame the shark. I’m the one who chose to enter its environment.
So I don’t think the answer to Hollywood’s portrayal is to replace fear with harmlessness. I think it’s to replace fear with understanding and respect.
That’s what I hope my photographs can do. I want people to see the power, beauty, curiosity and wildness of these animals all at once. A great white shark doesn’t need us to make it scarier than it is, but it also doesn’t need us to make it less of a shark.
3. After spending hundreds of hours in the water with great whites, have you learned to recognize something we might call an individual “personality” in each shark? Is there one shark whose character has stayed with you?
Absolutely. One hundred percent.
Some sharks returned to Guadalupe year after year almost like clockwork, and after enough encounters you started recognizing not only the individual animal, but how that animal tended to behave.
Some were incredibly inquisitive and would come right up to the cage. Others preferred to keep their distance. Whether they’re interested in us, our cameras, the cage itself, or simply all the unusual sensory information we’re introducing into their environment, I can’t say for certain. But what became undeniable to me was that different sharks responded differently.
There was a shark named Dante, for example, who had a habit of eating seagulls from the surface. You could almost set your clock by him. If there had been a bunch of seagulls sitting on the water and suddenly they were all gone, there was a pretty good chance Dante was somewhere nearby.
I have a lot of shark tattoos, and the individual sharks tattooed on me all mean something — sometimes because they were incredible to photograph, sometimes because of their appearance, and sometimes because of their personality.
One that immediately comes to mind is a shark named Paul Walker. He was named after the actor, who was a great advocate for sharks and loved visiting Guadalupe before he passed away.
Paul Walker the shark is an enormous extrovert.
He’s a huge animal — over fifteen feet — and he loved coming incredibly close to the cages. I’ve spent hours in the water with him doing these enormous circles around us, sometimes so close that his pectoral fin would bang along the cage bars as he passed.
And yet, in all that time, I never saw him behave aggressively toward us. I’ve watched him become extremely animated around the bait, but his behavior toward the people in the cage was completely different. He seemed genuinely curious about what we were and what we were doing.
Other sharks were completely aloof and preferred to stay farther away. The younger sharks could be particularly fascinating because they often seemed to be figuring out where they belonged.
There’s a hierarchy happening in front of you. You watch sharks size one another up and see which animal gets access to something and which one backs away. Sometimes a large shark would essentially head-butt the bait without even taking it. It almost felt like the message was simply, This is mine. Nobody else touches it.
But some of my favorite moments are much quieter. A shark will pass the cage close enough that you can actually watch its eye moving. You see it looking at you, looking at the cage, looking somewhere else and then seemingly giving you the side-eye again as it passes.
It’s very difficult to spend that kind of time with an animal, watch those individual behaviors repeat themselves, and come away believing there’s nothing happening inside its head.
The gears are absolutely turning.
So yes, I believe individual sharks have personalities. Some are bold, some cautious, some curious, some aloof, and every once in a while you meet one like Paul Walker who seems to want to be right in the middle of everything.
And those are the individuals you never forget.
4. When you are underwater, who really decides the photograph: the photographer or the shark? How much control are you willing to surrender in order to capture something authentic?
The shark. You have essentially zero control as the photographer.
But honestly, that’s how I like to photograph most things. Whether I’m photographing sharks, music, wildlife or almost anything else, I’ve always preferred being the fly on the wall. I don’t want to manufacture the moment. I want to find it — find the light, find the composition, anticipate what’s about to happen and hopefully be ready when everything comes together.
That’s one of the things I love most about photographing great white sharks. I can’t tell a shark to swim toward me. I can’t tell it where the light is beautiful. I certainly can’t tell it to open its mouth.
At Guadalupe we had incredibly talented shark wranglers working the bait at the surface, and a great wrangler can help bring an animal closer and put you in a position where something might happen. But ultimately, the shark decides.
As a photographer, your job is to give yourself the best possible chance.
You learn to read what’s happening. You see a shark approaching and try to anticipate its direction. You position yourself, get your camera ready, think about the light and composition, and maybe recognize that something is about to happen.
But after that, you’re along for the ride.
You can be prepared. You can understand your equipment. You can know the behavior you’ve witnessed before. You can put yourself in exactly the right place. But you cannot force the photograph to happen.
And I think that’s what makes it authentic.
Every time you get into the water it’s different. Sometimes the sharks are incredibly active and inquisitive. Sometimes they’re aloof. Sometimes they’re right in your face, and sometimes they want absolutely nothing to do with you.
Of course there are photographs I’ve imagined beforehand and would love to create, and part of me wishes I could occasionally say, Okay, swim right there and open your mouth.
But if I could actually do that, I think it would take away the thing I love most about it.
You’re witnessing something completely wild, unfolding in real time, and your only job is to recognize the moment and capture it.
For me, that’s where the art is. And when everything finally comes together — the animal, the light, the timing and you being ready for it — it’s absolutely exhilarating.
5. Wildlife photography can sometimes turn the pursuit of an extraordinary image into an obsession. What is the line you would never cross, even if the photograph of your career were waiting on the other side?
It’s a complicated question for a lot of wildlife photographers, but for me the answer is actually very simple:
The animal comes first. Always.
Am I obsessed with photographing great white sharks? Absolutely. But that obsession comes from an unwavering love for the animal. If getting a photograph requires me to compromise the welfare of the animal I’m supposedly there because I love, then what’s the point?
I think one of the most important things you can do as a wildlife photographer is surround yourself with people who share that philosophy. If you’re participating in any kind of wildlife or ecotourism experience, do your homework. Make sure the people you’re with are animal-first and that they follow the regulations and guidelines in place.
With great white sharks at Guadalupe, we were in cages, so there were natural limitations on what we could physically do around the animals. But there are still ethical considerations, including how bait is used and how the animals are interacted with.
The fundamental thing I always remind myself is: you’re in their house.
This is their environment. Their home. We’re guests there, and we should behave accordingly.
If an operator starts encouraging questionable behavior because somebody wants a photograph, attention, money or social-media clout, that’s a huge warning sign to me. It’s disrespectful to the animal, and it can also become dangerous for the people involved.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to surround myself with people who are just as crazy about these animals as I am. They’re the kind of people who would happily put the camera away and leave rather than disturb an animal for the sake of an image.
We take the same approach when we’re around orcas in the Sea of Cortez. If there are too many boats crowding an animal, boats chasing them, or behavior we don’t feel comfortable participating in, we’re perfectly happy to leave.
Maybe the photograph of a lifetime was about to happen.
That’s okay.
There will always be another photograph. There isn’t another version of that moment where you get to undo the stress or harm you caused an animal just because you wanted the shot.
We’re guests in their world.
For me, the line is wherever respect for the animal ends. No photograph is worth crossing it.
