These are mermaids’ purses. I found them on a beach in the Eastern Cape. I was very very excited. And gathered them up to photograph. Because they are so beautiful I wanted everyone to see them. And in honour of Sarah Anne Bright, a woman whose photograph of A Mermaid’s Purse is one of the earliest.
When I up to the house I said to Great Aunt Phoebe: “Are these mermaids’ purses, otherwise known as sharks’ eggs?” and she said “Actually they are sharks’ eggs’ cases or sacs." Because she is a Biologist. And she checked to see if any of these little wombs had mini sharks still inside them. Phoebe has only ever found three still containing mini sharks in her whole life. That is once every 28 years, Jack told me.
Then she got out a big book with pictures of all the different sharks’ eggs’ cases and we saw we had found some belonging to sand sharks and some to rays, and some to stripey sharks and some to bigger sharks. Before the baby sharks burst out and then the mermaids took them to put their silver bits and and their shells into.
I recently learned a lot about sharks because I did a story about them. It had to be factual. And the facts were to be checked. So I went to the aquarium and to the sharks’ board. I interviewed shark scientists and some marine conservationists. Many of the shark experts were too busy and important to talk to me. Or else told me at length about how amazing they were for devoting their lives to saving sharks. Rather than anything about the marine type of shark. Despite my attempts to carefully guide them back to the topic, and what is actually interesting.
So then I went swimming in the sea to directly find sharks and interview them. You can because, like us, sharks are very good at body language. Some humans are better at this than others, picking up subtext in milliseconds and coming to rely on behaviour rather than words, if they are interested in the truth. But sharks are better. They are the Best. They have extra senses, we humans don’t possess, all along their bodies. Empathy is available to all sharks: built in. They can Feel other hearts beating. Not just their own. Also they have noses as sensitive and complex as vaginas and brilliant rotating teeth. Even their skin, velvety smooth when rubbed in one direction, is made of teeth. They are the full package.
I also turned to biology text books and the internet, and listened to The Old Man and the Sea read by Donald Sutherland, and I watched Jaws again. I spoke to surfers and swimmers and found out what happens when you accidentally stand on a sand shark, or when you catch a wave and the shark was there first. I read my friend Melissa’s book called Sharks, Death, Surfers, again and I listened to her on the radio. And it was here I learned the most. Like what happens if a shark goes to the movies. What if they watch A Clockwork Orange. What do they see and what do we miss when we watch it. I learned that sharks have helped us solve turbulence problems in physics and are helping us make artificial wombs. And I learned some more about human sharks, like Ted Kennedy.
In one episode, on Resonance 104.4FM https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/the-view-from-a-shark-ep4/ Melissa spoke sharks and photography. Harold Edgerton, together with ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, built a camera that could withstand salt and waves and pressure and depth. And that was activated when a bio-luminescent creature (producing light from its own body such as a Lantern Shark) swam passed. The creature’s own inner glow would click the shutter release, 6000 metres down. Sharks taking selfies.
And another link to sharks and photography takes us back to the very beginning. The beginning of photography, of learning to take pictures, the beginning of sharks, and new life, and the beginning of this piece of writing. Back to my excitement and the beautiful egg cases.
“A Mermaid’s Purse is the subject of one very early example of photography,” Melissa says. “it is an image from around 1840 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just a pale rectangular shape on a dark background. With lines twirling away at each corner. These are the tendrils that help the case attach to the sea floor keeping it steady… The photograph is most recently attributed to Sarah Anne Bright, who belonged to a group of photographic pioneers.” At first it is attributed to Anonymous, of course.
Bright’s picture is actually a photogram, where you place a mermaid’s purse onto paper, and expose it to light. Where the light reaches the paper, it darkens. Where the object blocks the light, it stays white. It is a slow process. In McCarthy’s words “What the early methods had in common was that they were slow: It took a relatively long time for the chemicals in the material to register and retain the effects of light on them.
Developing my photograph of a mermaid’s purse was not slow, photography nowadays is quick and digital. But it has taken a least a year or two, and at least another of dabbling for me to produce, even one or two, Worthy pictures. The process is still slow in that sense. As Melissa continues, “It’s fitting that photography is concerned with the under water and sharks and wombs. There is something in photography that is inherently about patience, development, gestation, waiting in the dark liquid, for the image, the new life to emerge.”
Out come the sassy new sharks into the dark sea, leaving us and the mermaids their cases to make into pictures.
To listen to Melissa’s podcasts go to Resonance 104.4FM https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/the-view-from-a-shark-ep4/
Go to my writing page to read more about sharks