Ever since Steven Spielberg set a shark fin gliding through the waters of a fictional New England town, Martha’s Vineyard has become irrevocably associated with the movie Jaws. The photographer Maggie Shannon was born more than a decade after the film was shot on the island, in 1974, but growing up on the Vineyard she had a Jaws poster hanging from her wall, and would attend the annual Monster Shark Tournament that took place each July. Since then, the Vineyardits close-knit year-round community, the legacy of Jaws, and the island’s relationship to the many tourists who descend upon it each yearhas become a central subject of her work.
For her new series, Shannon joined one of the fishing crews who participated in this year’s Monster Shark event, documenting the bait, the blood, and the physicality involved in hauling sharks from the ocean. It is, in a sense, a series about the loss of a Vineyard tradition: after twenty-seven years on the island, the tournament, facing controversy for the rowdy crowd of tourists it attracted each year, as well as opposition from animal-rights groups, moved last year from the Vineyard to Newport, Rhode Island. Where the competition at its peak drew hundreds of boats and millions of dollars to the Vineyard economy (it was featured on ESPN in 2004), Shannon says that only a couple dozen boats participated this year in Newport.
From the outside, it’s easy to feel discomfort with an event that celebrates hunting a vulnerable animal for sport. (The tournament is now largely catch and release, but some species are kept and eaten.) Still, Shannon sees a respect for ocean life in the fishermen’s efforts to engage, face to face, with an animal that, thanks in large part to Hollywood, we most often envision as a shadowy, invisible threat. There’s this sense of camaraderie and brotherhood that emerges, she said. The shark catches the line, and everyone comes together to fight.
Condé Nast.