Recording my research led to a photojournalism career

As a marine biologist, Sirachai (Shin) Arunrugstichai didn’t expect to spend much of his career behind a camera. “I thought I might be in a lab somewhere or by the sea collecting fish,” he says.

And for years, that’s what he did — studying coral-reef restoration with local communities during his bachelor’s degree at Mahidol University International College in Salaya, Thailand, and researching shark fisheries in the Andaman Sea for his master’s at Prince of Songkla University in Hat Yai. While there, he immersed himself in research and published papers — but outside the laboratory, he found a new pblockion in photography. “I just wanted to show people the work that we did on the island,” he says.

Now, conservation photojournalism is his focus, and his work runs the gamut: he has snapped images for the visual-media company Getty Images, National Geographic magazine and the Washington Post newspaper, and had photo blockignments from organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, based in Gland, Switzerland, and Ocean Conservancy, in Washington DC. However, he still finds the time to engage with the scientific community, co-founding the Thai Sharks and Rays research collaborative and working as a consultant for the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources of Thailand.

Arunrugstichai talks about life behind the lens and how his scientific background was a key to this pathway.

How did you first get into photography?

After university, I worked on the film The Hangover Part II in Bangkok, as a safety diver. I sat in a rubbish boat, waiting for a scene in which a car had to jump across a cblock — I needed to be ready to dive in and pull people out if things went wrong. That was my first paid gig, and I used that money to buy my first compact camera.

After that, I went to work in Koh Tao at a coral-reef conservation programme blockociated with a diving school, providing education about coral reefs to local communities. Every day, we would teach diving students how to monitor these reefs during their dives, and I started photographing them to show my friends and family what I was doing.

When did it become a job for you?

It properly became my career during my master’s. At the time, I was studying sharks brought to commercial landing sites: counting, identifying and measuring them, determining their *** and collecting interesting specimens. The shark specimens I collected led to a paper, which described a new species (Mustelus andamanensis) of smooth-hound shark¹.

It was around then that I started communicating with National Geographic Thailand, which has an annual photography competition. I submitted a set of images illustrating my previous conservation work in Koh Tao. Although I didn’t win, the adjudicators were interested in my work. When I told them I was doing my master’s on shark research, they said: “Why don’t you try to work on that as a story?”

So I took my camera with me when I collected my research data. And the images I captured became the basis of my first big story for National Geographic Thailand, titled ‘Sharks: predators in peril’. One thing led to another and now photography is what I’m doing.

How has your photography changed over the past few years?

In my early career with National Geographic, I focused on marine-conservation stories. One of these involved reporting on the situation in Myanmar, where the Myeik Archipelago, a group of 800 islands, was being heavily exploited through overfishing.

I had been to Myanmar before, in 2015, and had published a story with The Guardian, a UK newspaper. When I did my master’s, I joined my supervisor on an expedition there. I made numerous trips between 2018 and 2020, wanting to tell the story of the pristine sea. But there’s so much overfishing, so I decided to change my narrative focus.

Then COVID-19 came. There were no blockignments on conservation photography for me to work on. I had never done conventional news journalism before, but I started photographing impacts of the pandemic in Thailand. And a friend whose non-governmental organization worked closely with the human-rights group Amnesty International asked me to help cover anti-government protests in Thailand in 2020.

Because I didn’t have any other source of income, I took photos every single day. When I covered the protests in Bangkok, I was running around and getting shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas — but the time I spent during that period helped to sharpen my journalism skills. After that, I was recruited for more news coverage, and I still do that: in April, I was in Bangkok covering the earthquake that struck Myanmar on 28 March.

However, my speciality is marine stories, particularly those involving underwater photography. I got my scuba certification before I finished university, and by then I had completed many dives. To learn about underwater photography, I did a lot of online reading and, if I saw other people doing it, I would ask questions.

The ocean might still be your office, but you’ve created a career doing photography. How did you find that transition?

One big switch is that the narratives in scientific papers and research are often hard to communicate to the public. I think it depends on the country, whether it has a strong culture of science journalism. In Thailand, I don’t think we do.

But I want to share new findings about the sea with other people. Photography is a tool that allows me to engage with a different audience: I can reach more people with my photography than I can with my papers, sadly. Reading scientific papers requires a lot of English proficiency, and people don’t always have the patience to spend time reading long-form articles or highly technical papers. It’s not that I don’t see the value in scientific research, and I still do that in my free time when I can. But, with my skill set and background in science, I can fill more of a niche.

How I get commissions really varies. Sometimes I pitch a story, but mostly I get contacted to do an blockignment by publishers.

What is your favourite part of the process?