In a series of publications spanning the 1910s and 1920s, anglers attempted to crack the puzzle of fishing — what makes a fish bite, or not — through photography. Fisherman-scientists experimented with the cameras of their day to capture the world as seen from the fish’s eye. They created above-ground observation tanks, cordoned off sections of streams, and submerged “periscope”-like devices encased in glass. They grappled with dilemmas of distortion and refraction. Ultimately, the images they produced — of flies (real and fake) suspended on the water’s surface, of fishing line, and sometimes even of the photographers themselves — have their own avant-garde quality. These photos are an exercise in cross-species empathy: they are an effort to enter the mind of the fish through the lens of the camera.

“Imagine yourself, then, under the water, on the bed of a river. Seen from below, the surface of the water would appear as an extensive mirror, with the river-bed reflected upon it.” Above you, the mirrored surface would be punctuated by the “window”, a circular portal through which the refraction between air and water makes the terrestrial world visible. This, writes the photographer Francis Ward in his 1919 volume Animal Life Under Water, is the “fish’s point of view”.

If we were to take Ward at face value, his attempt to enter the fish’s perspective is spurred simply by scientific rigour. Without this dimension, he suggests, any naturalist’s account of a fish’s life “cannot be considered complete”. But the title of one of Ward’s earlier forays into underwater photography, “The Angler from the Fish’s Point of View”, hints at a more practical motivation. In fact, Ward was just one sport fisherman among many eager to hone the art and science of fishing through underwater photography.

In his 1922 book Secrets of the Salmon, the American inventor Edward Ringwood Hewitt (1866–1957) used moving-picture film to capture insects and artificial flies as they disturbed the surface of his purpose-built tank. The stills he selected reveal a cacophony of water distortions and light effects. “The fish”, Hewitt writes, “sees anything from Raphael’s Cherub through Cubist art to Hindenburg, and all in rapid succession; no wonder he cannot always recognize me.”

For Hewitt, slipping into the fish’s mind was a task that demanded hands-on experience. He simply could not rely on indirect accounts of the fish’s perspective, not even the photographs produced by other anglers. By way of introduction to Secrets’ full-page photo composites “taken from the fish’s view”, Hewitt writes: “I wanted to see for myself how flies really looked to the fish, as I never like to accept any scientific fact as really so if I can possibly repeat the experiment for myself.”

Hewitt and Ward both anticipated challenges from readers questioning whether the camera actually approximates the fish’s view of things. The fish’s eye, after all, is not a human eye (to say nothing of its fish mind). Hewitt waves the question aside: “I am not going into the debated question of the eye of the fish”, he states outright. “It seems to me it is fair to assume that he sees the visual image which is really there and that he sees the same thing we do, with this difference: our eyes combine to make one image and give a stereoscopic effect, while the eyes of the fish are independent of each other.”

Whether or not they replicated the fish’s experience exactly, the authors found their underwater photos useful. Hewitt’s allowed him to propose new fly designs based on real insects and casting methods tuned to weather conditions. Ward captured the angler from below in a series of outfits — a green tweed suit and a white dust coat — as visual evidence for fish-deceiving camouflage.

The photographers’ critics may have cried anthropomorphization, but perhaps there’s another charge to levy. It’s not just that the fish is humanized in Hewitt’s and Ward’s work, but also that the angler converges with his catch. Getting a fish to bite is a task that, according to Hewitt, requires complete immersion in the fish’s life. To understand the salmon, for example, “we must study salmon psychology as well as know the salmon’s physical habits and life history.” The ideal angler is modelled by a certain Rudyard Kipling character, a captain who “had a mind like a cod and could think like a cod.” Short of diving into the stream oneself, the camera allowed the angler to get as close as possible to swimming with his prey.

A few last questions a critic might pose to the photographer-anglers: does wading so deep into the fish’s psyche not make it harder to reel one in? Does inserting oneself into the piscine mind’s eye make bringing your catch home for dinner any harder? Or, as the case may be, does the satisfaction of anticipating the “most unusual and unaccountable things [a salmon does]” outweigh any pangs of conscience?“