Thanks to his exhibition, Nice marine photographer Greg Lecoeur hopes to raise public awareness of the beauty and fragility of this site.
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The Pelagos Sanctuary is an area of 87,500km² of protected space in the Mediterranean located between Italy, Monaco and France.
Since September 27, Nice photographer Greg Lecoeur has presented his exhibition “Pelagos”.
Among his photos exhibited facing the Big Blue: the portrait of a monk seal, a species that has almost disappeared from the shores of the Mediterranean.
This monk seal was recently seen by scientists and photographed by Greg Lecoeur who had accompanied them for more than 15 years
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© Greg Lecoeur
With this exhibition, Greg Lecoeur wishes to raise awareness among the general public of magic, but also of the difficulties encountered by this underwater universe as the sanctuary celebrates its 25th anniversary.
We really wanted to show that in the Mediterranean, we can find whales, dolphins, turtles, rays. All the emblematic species that can be found at the ends of the earth, we have them here a few miles offshore. We wanted to bring back these images to show what we were able to observe.
Greg Lecoeur, marine photographerat France 3 Côte d’Azur
Greg Lecoeur is known and recognized for his photographic prowess.
Most of the photos were taken in the Pelagos sanctuary, a protected area in the Mediterranean. It comes from the Pelagos agreement, a multilateral agreement between France, Italy and the Principality of Monaco, signed in Rome in 1999 and entered into force in 2002. An agreement that is still relevant today more than ever.
Its objective is to protect and preserve the habitat of marine mammals.
It’s fragile, there are a lot of threats like collisions, pollution and accidental fishing. We really need to put management measures in place to reduce the threats to these species as much as possible.
Viola Cattani, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Pelagos Agreementat France 3 Côte d’Azur
Although the Mediterranean is small in size, it still represents 8% of the world’s fauna and 18% of the flora.
The Pelagos exhibition is held in Nice until the end of October, before moving to Genoa in Italy.
(With Yannick Fournigault, in Nice)
