From Ocean Guardian to Land Steward: The Evolution of Chris Fallows
Chris Fallows, the acclaimed wildlife photographer behind the jaw-dropping “Air Jaws” shots that blew up Shark Week, has set sail on a daring new adventure. After the heart-wrenching loss of great whites to silence in False Bay, South Africa, Chris and Monique, his partner in the field and in life, have traded the swell of ocean swells for the winds of southern Africa’s savannahs.
Armed with the same resolve that once kept him patient behind a boat’s lens, he’s now rewilding sprawling tracts of land with native grasses, returning cheetahs to open plains, and creating corridors for wandering elephants. That the heritage of “Air Jaws” stretches further than dramatic aerials is turning out to be a promise, not a limitation. The couple’s campaign is a lens-flipping pivot: from ocean to soil, from cameras to conservation.
The Air Jaws adventure started in the shadow of a heartbreaking goodbye. For a long stretch of time, False Bay dazzled the world as a meeting place for great whites, and Nick’s snap of a leaping shark became the face of nature’s sheer force. “No one fought harder than we did,” he says, telling how he chased off poachers and stood outside government offices until his feet ached. But by the end of 2018, the bay fell silent.
Scientists sometimes blame hunting by killer whales, yet Nick thinks overfishing and our foot-shaped footprint in the ocean tell a larger part of the story. Watching the bay go still, Nick felt a light go on in his mind: “The ocean isn’t a necklace we can wear, but land is ground we can walk, fence, and heal.” He believes the best shot for the bay, and for sharks yet to be born, lies in reclaiming and stewarding the land, one small slice at a time, to let nature write its comeback on its own terms.
The First Roots of a Forest: Rewilding the Breede River
In 2017, the proceeds from selling art—especially the famous “Air Jaws” shots—helped a couple acquire a 25-hectare flat stretch of riverbank south of Cape Town. The site was sad: alien acacia had choked the riverbank, pushing out everything that belonged there. Clearing the acacias was slow and sweaty, but the moment the last weed fell, the ground was ready. “At first I doubted anything could grow,” says the owner, “but the first wild olive, the first yellowwood, proved me wrong. Next the fynbos took charge.”
Now the sight is surreal: a wild quilt of proteas, silver-leafed buchus, and yellow-leaved honeybush rippling along a living riverbank. Signs of other life followed. Bushbuck leave tracks in river sand. Brindle duikers click twig to twig. Migrant honeyguides chase our phone camera flash. The first wild olive, the first yellowwood, showed the path and proved the panic, “Nothing here,” was wrong. “What was the truth,” says the owner, “is that this site was waiting for the answer all along.” Today, not a fifteener price tag or charity wine event, but a simple 50-liter garden spritzer demom the answer.
Neighbors, once proud of alien rows, are seeing the change and, garden spritzer in hand, are spruting seedlings, not regrets. Where a lonely riverbank once staggered, a fresh River Rewilding Club of nearby or other land owners is spruting from the seeds the couple planted.
A Vision for the Future: Creating Continental Migration Corridors
The Fallows refuse to rest on their past successes. They are now hard at work on a new frontier: a property in Namibia stretching across 10,000 hectares (about 24,710 acres). Sales from their Air Jaws photography have already pulled in close to $1 million, a nest egg they are putting straight toward land purchase. But the future they imagine goes beyond one piece of land. These two conservationists are rallying neighbors, ranchers, and local groups to unite the region into what could be one of Africa’s biggest private wildlife reserves, a stretch near 5 million acres.
“The goal is to stitch together mammoth pathways where animals can move freely, just as they always did,” explains Fallows. They are already in talks to connect their own property with existing conservation hotspots, including the nearby Fish River Canyon, where a cornerstone project is planting the globe’s biggest sanctuary for black rhino.
In vivid detail, Fallows lays out the parade of animals he hopes to welcome back: a cheetah sliding low in the grass, black rhino munching shaded marula leaves, brown hyena surveying the night, and in time, the regal roar of lions and clouds of desert elephants at the water’s edge. “Restoring these wild rhythms feels like a dream,” he says. “The reward is in knowing you are leaving them a full house of environment to grow into—and the chance to become, once more, the quarry of legends.”
The Photographer’s Philosophy: A Lifetime of Respect for the Wild
Paul Fallows’ vision of Air Jaws rewilding comes straight from three decades spent beneath the sun with a camera in hand. Each graphic encounter with the world’s top predators—from a slow stroll beside a pride of lions to a camera-ready drift through turquoise with a pack of great whites—has forged a rare empathy. “I simply no longer see swimming beside a great white or crisscrossing sand beside a lion as a risk, but as an unexpected kindness,” he explains, shrugging off the fearful headlines. “These cats would rather feast on seals on a good day. I’m merely loafing in the dappled light.”
That same spark of respect shifts seamlessly from a shutter-click moment to a lifecycle mission. Each intense frame of Discovery Channel’s Air Jaws, each lens flare he sets beside diminishing kelp forest, tells the same undiluted refrain. Fallows tells young lens-wielders: “Let your hands ache with love, your heart tinged with dark, then you wrestle deadlines for no paycheck.
A guide, a find, the weight of a moment baking beneath your square of sand. Without longing, no list. Without loss, no fight.” For him, a photograph never simply hangs on a gallery wall. It advises, it howls on windy headlands, it rallies the living with the pulse of a shutter echoing the very heartbeat he steps into each dawn to reclaim.
A Legacy Forged in the Air Jaws Era
Everything growing from this moment traces its roots straight back to “Air Jaws.” Discovering breaching great white sharks at Seal Island in 1996 opened Discovery’s doors, leading to 11 films through which shark leaps lit up the globe. For me, those years were more than global fame; they were an open-air lab.
A low mount for the camera, an extreme wide-angle out over a rotting seal, the quick electricity between concept and first frame never slowed. We perfected zooming in a breath from the shark’s face, and that rush of poise, power, and sheer claws-up beauty became the way to tell the planet’s next coastal story with same heart. Now that need has turned to reviving entire landscapes, and the lab just moved inland and upside.
When I try to sum up a lifetime spent in the bays and back hills of the African coast, the rewilding syllabus remains the capstone. “With the proceeds of our fine artwork, my wife and I want to buy large tracts of land in Southern Africa”—fallows sighs —“to be rehabilitated and rewilded.” In those soft sandstone hills, in the frayed uplands above the coast where drought lets empty airs whistle through the rushing of brittle tongues, they want carbon in the soil, herb in the valley, roaring life back where knobs of water once curved through stone.
The artwork that mirrored the beauty of breaching Air Jaws sharks now dollars the next round and rents the next camera. But first its value flips from triptych to tract, from trophy to ticket, a living point of closure to leave – and the moment in between beyond our eyesight: a silence recovering the roar.
The lasting influence of the “Air Jaws” story goes beyond stunning slow-motion shots of breaching sharks. What started with those breathtaking Air Jaws moments now pushes us to move from quiet watching to hands-on saving. Chris Fallows shows us that a single, picture-perfect leap can take our breath away, but the deeper magic happens when we channel that awe into making sure there are Air Jaws sharks to leap tomorrow. He aims to grow a future where great forests stand tall and elephants can wander again. The “Air Jaws” legacy that first thrilled the world in the cinema now drives a lifelong promise to our planet.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/world/africa/air-jaws-photographer-chris-fallows-rewilding-spc
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