SHARKS ON LAND:
Fear & Fascination
by Bill Ravanesi
Duuunh duunnn... Duuunh duunnn.
That sound, just two bars of John Williams' score for the film JAWS, is enough to conjure up the fear felt by a generation whose summers at the beach are forever tinged with an excessive and irrational terror of sharks, a fear and fascination persisting 50 years after the making of Speilberg's film.
FACTS
There are fewer than 10 deaths globally due to shark attacks on humans. While around 100,000,000 sharks a year are killed by humans.
This means that a human's chance of dying from a shark attack is beyond minimal; roughly 1 in 795 million, similar to winning the lottery three times in a row, or struck by lightening 5,300 times. For sharks, the odds aren't as good. Today, 75% of the shark population is at risk of extinction.
It's always been humans who are eating sharks,
not the other way around.
Photographer Bill Ravanesi has been documenting "Sharks on Land" sitings for several years, capturing the ways images of sharks have been used to attract attention — for decoration, to promote businesses, and almost always to titillate viewers with a shiver of fear and loathing. Often the sitings are camp, some are comical, some downright scary — all demonstrating our fear/fascination with these fin-backed predators.
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Photographer's Statement
In 1994, I was invited by my good friend, the New Yorker investigative journalist Paul Brodeur, to a lunch with Peter Benchley, the author of the best-selling novel, Jaws. At lunch, Brodeur an avid fisherman, needled Benchley about the tragic impact that his book and the subsequent film based on it, directed by Stephen Spielberg and co-written by Benchley, was having on the global shark species.
That conversation piqued my curiosity about the place of sharks in the human imagination. In subsequent decades, as I traveled to Cape Cod and other coastal areas with my camera, I notice an abundance of shark-related paraphernalia. As a documentary photographer, I decided to channel my own angler’s passion into documenting the public’s fear and fascination with White Sharks.
According to Change.org more than 100 million sharks die every year. The global shark population has declined by 70% in just 60 years. In recent years, vast numbers of seals have settled throughout the Cape Cod and Island waters, and especially on the outer Cape. Depending on the season, as many as 30,000 to 50,000 can congregate on the outer Cape. The seals have attracted large numbers of Whites Sharks (also known as Great White Sharks) in search of food. Last year, according to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC) more than 160 Great White Shark detections were sighted off the Cape and along the coastal waters of Massachusetts.
These selected photographs offer a view of how the residents of the Cape and other coastal communities are “imagining” the White Sharks through conservation, art, commerce, humor, tragedy and science.
- Bill Ravanesi, Photographer, Founder of the Center for Visual Arts for the the Public Interest (CVAPI)