Writer, bookbinder, photographer and the first woman oceanographer, Anita Conti imposed herself in the very masculine world of fishing. She took part in 1935 in campaigns aboard the first French oceanographic vessel and, before the Second World War, spent a hundred days on a cod trawler in the Barents Sea and around Spitsbergen. Her missions allowed her to publish reports and articles illustrated with her own frames made with a Rolleiflex, and she never failed to denounce the overexploitation of the oceans. During the war she obtained permission to embark as a navy photographer on minesweepers in the Channel and the Mediterranean, recording the attempts at clearing mines. In occupied France's colonies she helped improve fishing conditions on the West African coast, setting up drying stations in Senegal and creating a shark fishery in Guinea. Accepted and respected by the fishermen and the sailors she photographed as a reporter, with bold points of view — dives and low angles that take the reader inside deep-sea fishing — she embarked in 1952 for several months on a trawler on the banks of Newfoundland.