Giants by JEM CRESSWELL is a photographic celebration of one of nature’s most majestic creatures. Read on for an extract from the foreword and a sneak peak from the book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Over a five-year period, photographer and filmmaker Jem Cresswell took more than 11,000 images of one of nature’s largest mammals – the humpback whale – in Tongan waters.

In Giants, Cresswell selects the most striking of these images to document the awe-inspiring behaviours of the humpback whale in a powerful combination of photography and storytelling.

EXTRACT

From 1904, until full protection in 1985, humpback whales were hunted to the very brink of extinction. It’s estimated during this time that more than 200,000 humpback whales were killed in the Southern Hemisphere alone by commercial whalers. Though this number is likely much higher due to undocumented or purposely under-recorded takes by both legal and illegal whaling companies. Alarmingly, the global population was reduced by 95 per cent.

In 2006, a scientific study by Patrick R. Hof and Estel Van der Gucht (of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York) confirmed the presence of spindle cells in the brains of humpback whales. In humans and great apes, these cells are strongly tied to social organisation, empathy, and intuition as well as rapid gut reactions. Even when accounting for the fact that their brains are larger than ours, humpback whales carry three times the amount found in humans. The ramifications of these findings alone should be revelatory to the way we as a species interact with whales in general, but unfortunately most people remain unaware.

Like primates and humans, humpback whales have evolved complex social networks and behaviours, with studies indicating they have done so for around 30 million years, long before humans. They communicate using a highly developed and intuitive combination of body language, gesture, sound. and motion. The famously sonorous songs of the male humpback span pitches of up to 7 octaves that revolve around a central theme. These songs may resonate for miles, enabling humpbacks to correspond across vast oceanic distances.

Humpbacks often hunt in cooperative groups and take up unique roles in complex hunting strategies. Amazingly, there are hundreds of documented cases of humpbacks defending other species from pods of hunting Orcas. On average, a Southern Hemisphere humpback whale migrates 5,000 kilometres each year, one of the longest mammalian migrations on the planet. It’s a journey that takes the humpback from summer feeding grounds in the mighty Southern Ocean to winter breeding grounds in the tropical waters of the Pacific and back again.

During the winter of 2014, photographer Jem Cresswell found himself suspended above the blue black infinitude of the Pacific. A tiny bipedal speck regarding a gargantuan for the first time. The giant creature glides towards him in a way that is searching and curious. Its eye assesses him with a gaze that is almost human and yet somehow far beyond that. The humpback, seemingly conscious of the size disparity, manoeuvres itself effortlessly around Cresswell, turning and rolling on perfect trajectories, staying close but never colliding.

Wordless exchanges between sentient species are annihilating in their immediacy. Body language leaves very little doubt that we all borrow from the same library of behaviours. For Cresswell, these are moments of complete expansion. They invoke a total-sensory present where history, the future and everything in between evaporates. An experience that is a revelatory and humbling – reinforcing his insignificance in the greater scheme of things, eliciting a feeling that transcends fear and joy, utterly life altering in its scope.

The collection of portraits that you are about to leaf through has been painstakingly selected from a stockpile of over 11,000 astounding images that were captured by Cresswell over a five-year period. During that time, he spent untold hours swimming with and photographing the groups of Southern Hemisphere humpbacks who breed and calve in the waters surrounding the Tongan Ridge, adjacent to the Tongan Trench, which after the Mariana Trench is the second deepest ocean trench in the world.

Cresswell’s strikingly anthropomorphic work allows us to view these complex creatures and their intimate bonds, opening a small window into a world of giants who think, feel, and communicate in ways we may never fully understand. Yet across this divide we can share a mutual curiosity, and at times humpbacks even seem to welcome this connection. Here, we are endowed with a perspective that is often lost in the violence and noise of our human world. A perspective that forces us to acknowledge that beneath the surface differences of our physical bodies lay beings of undeniable kinship.

Foreword written by Eli Murphy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jem Cresswell is an Australian photographer and filmmaker renowned for his emotive underwater imagery. His work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world, with a particular focus on marine life.

In 2021 his documentary short titled Eyre & Sea screened at the San Diego International Film Festival, The Ocean Film Festival World Tour, Paris Short Film Festival, and Toronto Independent Film Festival. His photographic work has been exhibited in Australia, Paris, Kuwait, New York and China.

Visit Jem Cresswell’s website here.