Showcasing the Soul

Diving Into Dr. Shireen Rahimi’s Underwater Storytelling

All photos by Dr. Shireen Rahimi

Believe it or not, there are people who have never set eyes on the ocean. That’s a fact. It can be easy to forget the immense privilege of dipping a toe into the saltwater, catching a wave, or admiring golden hour from the sands of the big blue. The duty, call, and challenge of being an underwater photographer and storyteller like Dr. Shireen Rahimi is to spread this privilege through a medium that few others manage to leverage with such intention. Tapping into the magic of water itself, Dr. Rahimi’s daily challenge is to connect others to this often out-of-sight, out-of-mind environment. She’s well-equipped — with a doctorate in marine science and an unmatched eye for connecting humans to the souls and organisms that call the ocean home, her arsenal is loaded. In an attempt to understand exactly how she approaches her craft, we asked Dr. Rahimi to share her secrets with us. Turns out, it has a lot to do with caring about the people and things around you. 

Pohnpei, Micronesia

Any advice you would give to somebody picking up a camera for the first time?

Don't overthink it. I think that often, we believe we need the best gear, the perfect story, or to travel really far to tell compelling stories, and that's just not the case. For someone starting out, use the gear you have and make the most of it. Tell the story that's closest to you, because that's the one that will feel authentic. Don't be afraid to share it, because photography and storytelling are such iterative processes. It takes making shitty work. It takes failing. It takes getting rejected way more times than you get accepted. Try to build a thick skin in the process and remember that failure is a really important part of it, so don't be afraid to fail. Just go out there and do the work and share it. And if you keep doing it, if you're persistent enough, your work is going to get better and better, and you're going to be successful.

Photo by Phoebe Fitz

Throughout your career, how has your background in environmental science informed your work as a photographer and vice versa?

When I finished my degree, I decided to start a production company and go full-time into storytelling. I was like, “Well, that was a long five years of work for nothing.” I remember my mom was like, “Shireen, listen, you don't know how it's gonna help you now, but it's gonna help you, just wait and see.” And she was so right. Especially as a woman of color, I get taken so much more seriously because I have a degree. In the underwater photography space, we have an issue with representation. So it's been really helpful in that sense.

The important part is that my education taught me how to think about these things, how to make work that challenges dominant perspectives around how we think about the environment and how we think about other animals, breaking down the hierarchical thinking of humans on top and animals on the bottom. It kind of decolonized my mind and helped me think in a more outside-the-box way about how we tell stories about nature, because the story we've been telling ourselves about nature has been a false one. It’s been this story that nature is there for us to take resources from it, and it's inexhaustible. That's just not true. We need to tell new stories. We need to reshape those stories. That's what I see my work as — reimagining the stories that we tell ourselves about how humans should be in relation to the natural world if we want to have a sustainable, livable future on this planet. 

In terms of how storytelling impacted my scientific research, I no longer conduct formal scientific research; however, when I did, a significant part of my research methodologies involved visual anthropology. And in that methodology, there was a kind of new wave that considered images as an equally valid form of data collection as the written word and observation. Because ultimately, it's the same as writing. Science is inherently subjective. Whatever we choose to focus on is a result of our life experience and our subjective perspective of the world. 

Java Sea, Indonesia

As a marine scientist, what led you to pick up a camera to help tell stories of the ocean?

When I was getting my doctorate, I was going to some really crazy places — remote coastal communities in the Atacama coast of Chile, the Isle of Youth in Cuba (a very hard place to get to), and the Bahamas. When I visited these places, I would go underwater and see incredible things, such as huge stands of pillar corals that resembled an underwater cathedral, or people harvesting algae from the water and processing it in makeshift factories in the middle of the desert. I couldn’t just go there and not photograph what I was seeing. And I had always loved photography ever since my grandpa gave me a film camera when I was 15. So I started using it when I was doing my field research, and I realized that when I was sharing those photos, people were so interested in the images that I was creating and not as much in the science that I was doing. I thought, “Maybe I should do more of this.” 

So I put together a series of photographs and a short film comparing the coral reefs in Cuba and Florida, where I was getting my PhD at the time. I made my first film ever. I had no reputation, nothing. No one knew who I was at all. I had no prior work. I just went to our local bar in Miami and asked for a screening. And they were like, “Yeah, sure, we'll set up a projector. How many chairs do you need?” And I was like, “Maybe 20 to 30, my friends are gonna show up, probably no one else. It's raining.” 

About 200 people showed up that night. I did 20 minutes of a quick Q and A afterwards, and I was like, “Holy shit, people really care about the ocean, and they really want to know more about it, so if I want to make as big of an impact as possible, it’s obvious this is what I need to do.” When I graduated from my PhD in 2020, two months later, I started a production company. I'll never forget that night.

Over the course of your career, how has your goal of showcasing the current state of coral reefs evolved?

I didn't go to film school. I've never even taken a photography course. But you need to learn the rules before you break them. I've learned through trial and error, that a story should follow a certain kind of cadence. There should be a narrative arc and you want to build your character in certain ways. So it's definitely evolved in the sense that it started out really experimental and weird. It didn't really work, but it resonated a lot with certain audiences. Now, I'm at this point where I feel like I understand how to craft a compelling story, and my camera skills have always been strong. I'm finally at this moment where I understand how to make a film, but it's been a long, hard journey. 

As your work helps to bridge the gap between science and humanity, what is our responsibility as humans to protect these reefs?

Our responsibility is really simple. It's about doing what we can with the resources that we have in our immediate surroundings. I can't solve climate change, but I can advocate for the protection of the coral reef that is right off the shores of my house. At this time, it feels like the ocean is just getting pummeled with loss after loss and we feel like we have no control, because we really don't over the big things. But we do have control over our local surroundings and we can advocate for the protection of our local environments. If we all did that, then things would be a lot better. When you have those small wins, it makes you feel like the bigger wins are possible. 

People often ask me, “What can I do?” I like to direct them towards the Japanese concept of ikigai, which basically asks, “What are you good at, what do you enjoy doing, and what can you do that is of service to others?” Find something in that cross section. It doesn't have to be your job; it could be something you do on the weekends. If we all did that, then I think it would make a really big difference.

Explain how you use photography of our oceans to help foster emotional connections with people who might not have physically experienced them.

I like to highlight characters — real-world people — who have really relatable lives, relatable challenges, relatable relationships, connections, and bonds with other creatures, with other people, with their families. It could be a fisher who relies on the fish that he catches to feed his children. I mean, what could be more relatable than that? So I use that method of character-driven storytelling to drive empathy for ocean conservation, and really make the real-world consequences of corporate greed and a lack of political will around conservation and climate relatable by showing the impacts of it on people's everyday lives. That's the main way.

Then there are other techniques. For example, we just did a piece on coral reefs in the Red Sea, but the producer was like, “Well, we can't just do it about coral reefs. It needs to be about something more charismatic, so that people care about the coral reefs and get connected.” So the film became centered around dolphins who have this really crazy unique connection with the corals. They rub themselves on the corals as a form of skincare. That was one way in which the approach was to focus on this big, charismatic animal. I love getting close-ups of animals' eyes because it really humanizes them and makes us feel more connected. When we connect with the animals, we connect with the habitats that make their lives possible. The most powerful technique is when we can draw on the most relatable human experiences, which are interpersonal connections — love, loss, pain.

One photo of yours that tells the best story.

There's a photo from the same dolphin project. The dolphins are in the foreground, and then in the background is Dr. Angela Ziltener, a biologist who works with the resident dolphins in this area of the Red Sea in Egypt. This is one of the only areas in the world where dolphins are resident to a specific coral reef or a specific area, and there were 352 of these dolphins when we were there. She has this incredible relationship with the dolphins and knows a lot of them by name. So we'll go out and we'll get dive- bombed by these dolphins or something, and they'll be doing circles around us. Then they use echolocation to scan you, and that's how they see who you are. They're super curious. And we'd come up and Dr. Ziltener would be like, “Oh yeah, that was Deedee.” She knows them by the marks on their dorsal fins. And she would talk underwater with them, but it was like, *makes underwater dolphin sounds.* 

Hurghada, Egypt

And they would hear her, then they would come around and do circles around her. It was a remarkable experience. We were in the water every day for 10 days with dolphins. There was even this moment where she and I were trying to get this specific shot of a dolphin rubbing on a coral. It was our second-to-last day, so we were almost out of time and we needed this shot, and we just followed her intuition. She was like, “I just have a feeling they're going to be here, and I just have a feeling that we need to go to this step.” So we went down, and sure enough, they came out from the open ocean right in front of us and did the rubbing. This is what deep interspecies connection looks like — it's developed with time. They're very playful and very curious. That's the window into getting people to care, is telling stories about people who have dedicated their lives to this.