Diving for a good cause

On Monday I had the chance to be part of a photo and video performance the Word Wildlife Foundation (WWF) was organizing here in Berlin. The event took place at the Stadtbad Schöneberg and involved six freedivers being body painted as fish and swim into a net under water.



The performance was supposed to symbolize the bycatch that is making up to 100.000 tons of fish, that is a third of the overall amount that is fished in the North Sea. Bycatch is all of the fish that the fisher men actually do not want to end up in their nets because they are either too small or not the sort of fish they were fishing for. Most of these fish, however die in the process of fishing and are being cast back into the water.

Those numbers are getting even worse when you look at some special types of fish. The WWF report that was presented to the press just before the performance shows that for one kilogram of shrimps 15 kilogram of other fish die. So you might want to think twice before ordering a shrimps sandwich.

This been said there was no reason for us to fully support the WWF with this campaign. The six divers where Anna von Boetticher, Ulli Wulf, Ilka Michaelis and Martin Legat from the German national team, Nadine Werner (professional under water model and hopefully soon a competitive freediver) and my mermaid Elisabeth (yes, I had a hand in that selection).

The pool is 3,8m deep at the lower end and has a 3m wide window in about 2m depth. That made it perfect for a press event because the various camera teams could get a close look at what was going on under water.


I was in charge of coordinating the safety divers. We had 4 safety freedivers and two scuba diver. We were all quite nervous because that was a real fishing net and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It caught people. I am very happy that the only thing that needed to be rescued was a nose clip.

Six huge spot lights lit the water as we laid out large lanes of black foil weight with sandbags on the bottom of the pool. On top of that we put the nets and hang one across the pool for the divers/fish to get caught in. In the meantime the body painter got to work and paintbrushed the different motives onto the freedivers. That all took from about 6:00 to 12:00 am. We then did three sessions of shooting and at 13:00 pm it was all over.

The performance was a big success as you can see on the campaign website. There you will also find a video. I will be waiting for the press reports and the DVD that the WWF is going to send out to tell you more about it.

PS: I am thinking of a pool competition in that pool just because of the window... let’s see...