Paul Nicklen and his diving partner were ripping along the ocean floor off the coast of Victoria when his air supply ran out.
It was only his second dive, but Nicklen, then 19, was already calling it his passion. His path to that point had been one of searching: dabbling in genetics classes, considering veterinary science. But after learning a University of Victoria diving course would put him face-to-face with the sea life his biology professors drew on chalkboards, he mapped out the classes he could afford to skip and began spending the time underwater. On this day, he was looking for crabs when he started struggling to breathe. His partner began lifting him to the surface. But Nicklen’s lead weightbelt made him too heavy.
“I drifted back down to the bottom, alone, and he went to the surface,” Nicklen said. “He lost me in a cloud of silt.”
Nicklen frantically felt for the weights, but they’d spun under his oxygen tank behind him and out of reach. He began blacking out.
He eventually found the buckle, however, and woke up to his partner shaking him, above the surface.
“It was pretty close,” he said. “It was a good eye-opening lesson to have at a young age, to be a little safer after that.”
Twenty-five years later, at 44, Nicklen has had more eye-opening lessons than he can count.
Now a National Geographic photographer at the top of his field, specializing in polar environments, he’s survived multiple animal attacks, two near-fatal plane crashes, chronic health problems like damaged nerves caused by extreme environments, as well as at least 20 cases of frostbite.
The payoff has been in the images he captures: water teeming with narwhals as they break the surface for air, a rare Kermode bear in the Great Bear Rainforest, a “little fat dumpling” of a ringed seal floating head-first toward the surface, and hundreds more.
His life seems a balance of extremes in many ways: in return for great risk and sacrifice come moments of indescribable wonder and beauty.
And while his images have earned Nicklen the top awards in his field, as well as opportunities to lecture everyone from Jimmy Carter to Madeleine Albright, it’s about more than prestige.
“I’m not as excited anymore by just a picture,” he said, sitting in his Nanoose Bay home in front of a sweeping view of the water. “I believe it’s my moral obligation to drag or lure [readers] into the stories I believe in. And I can only do that with powerful photography.”
During a 2011 TED Talk, he showed a rapt audience photo after photo of the melting sea ice he sees regularly, and the polar creatures that are affected.
“What I’m trying to do with my work is put faces to this,” he told the audience. “If we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem.”
Part of the reason Nicklen has been so successful in capturing polar environments is because it’s where he feels most at home.
His family moved to Baffin Island when he was four, after his father was hired as a mechanic for the Department of Public Works. They were one of four non-Inuit families in the community of about 190.
While his brother Aaron was consumed with books, Nicklen preferred life outdoors. He learned about his environment: how to read the ice, how to hunt, where to find Arctic cod, how to use the snow’s insulating properties.
“I was a bit of a loner kid and I loved nature,” he said. “We had winds of 100 miles an hour up there, extreme blizzards, minus-30 degree temperatures. I would go bury myself in a snowbank and sit out there for hours.”
He also learned a respect for art from a community that shared folklore with vivid visual imagery.
His mother, Louise Roy, said Nicklen appeared totally at ease in the Inuit culture and shared the Inuit sensitivity to wildlife.
“He loved the formation of the icebergs, the dancing stars and the pattern of frost on the window. He seemed to appreciate what so many of us took for granted,” she said in an email.
But it wasn’t until he began diving at UVic that he knew what he wanted to do. And after catching a glimpse of Jacques Cousteau diving with orcas on TV, he went home and began mapping out his plans, instead of studying for his genetics final.
“I stayed up the entire nights drawing out my whole career on a piece of paper: Working for National Geographic magazine, photographing polar bears and orcas. Listing all the species I was going to shoot: when, how and how they were all going to tie together in the ecosystem,” he said.
He wrote a note to his professor on the back of his exam the next day, promising that he wouldn’t pursue a career in genetics if he could just have a passing D grade.
The goals he set that night have come true nearly exactly.
“It’s been eerily close,” he said.
Getting to National Geographic took him only seven years, but most were gruelling. At one point, he quit his job as a biologist, with $65,000 in the bank, and declared himself a professional wildlife photographer. A year later, he was broke, sleeping in his car in minus-40-degree weather and hadn’t sold a single photo, he said.
But thanks to a few mentors and his own strong resolve, he eventually got his foot in the door. Perhaps his best lesson came, oddly enough, from someone with almost the same name: Flip Nicklin, a pioneering whale photographer he met chasing polar bears, who taught him the importance of storytelling.
“It was never about how to take a picture,” he said. “It was about how to tell a story.”
It harkened back to Nicklen’s feelings as a biologist of needing to share the stories he was seeing.
“I always felt super-frustrated that we’d see these amazing things like polar bears, seals on the ice, wolves eating bearded seals — all this unbelievable stuff. And all I’d have to show for it at the end of the day was a pile of paper and data sets,” he said. “I thought, there’s got to be more, there’s got to be a way to communicate with the world what we’re seeing.”
Now he was trying to bridge the gap between science and the public through powerful imagery.
When he met photographer Joel Sartore on a shoot in Clayoquot Sound, they bonded over Bob & Doug McKenzie jokes. Nicklen had memorized every story Sartore shot for National Geographic and quizzed him on his path to the magazine: What age he got his first photo in, when he got his first cover shot.
“I think it was a checklist in his mind,” Sartore said on the road in the southern U.S. between shoots.
Nicklen would ultimately make it to National Geographic by shooting things other people couldn’t. The first shot he sold showed a rocket launching into a sky painted with the aurora borealis. Then the magazine bought a series of underwater shots. And finally, he carved a niche for himself shooting polar environments.
Nicklen takes enormous pride in being part of the National Geographic team. But being accepted didn’t alleviate any pressure.
“It’s like being in the NHL and there’s only one team,” he said. “And you’re only as good as your last story.”
The reality of the work is not romantic. After spending hours diving under ice, Nicklen is often near-hypothermic. And instead of returning to a heated camp, he layers his clothes and crawls into a sleeping bag in a tent on the ice. He may spend three months sitting in wait for an animal, before it arrives and he gets his shots in only three days. But he doesn’t pass the time reading — his mind races in nature.
“For me, it’s my drug,” he said. “Whatever experience people have when they’re on heroin — this has got to be way better. Nothing can touch this.”
Sometimes, it’s the rush of capturing a shot that no one else has. Other times, it’s about creating an image that astounds people. More often, it’s about bringing people closer to nature. A video of his interaction with a leopard seal, a prehistoric-looking creature that got a bad name for itself after killing a British scientist in 2003, has attracted more than 4.5 million views on YouTube. After putting Nicklen’s entire camera and head in its mouth in a threat display, the seal spent days trying to feed Nicklen penguins — a nurturing side that had never been seen.
It’s not without sacrifice.
“I haven’t had a normal life,” he said. “To go to a friend’s house and just sit around a campfire — it’s just a really rare moment in my life. I just cherish those moments.”
Spending most of each year on the road cost him a 20-year marriage that was otherwise strong. He’ll never have kids, despite wanting them desperately. The other day, he bought a baseball glove, in hopes someone might lend him their kid to play catch.
“To not have a family, I hope it’s a worthwhile sacrifice,” he said. “My mission to reconnect people with nature exceeds my own selfishness of having a kid.”
But Nicklen has also found love again in a new partner, Cristina Mittermeier, who has nearly grown children. The fact that she’s a conservation photographer is a huge bonus — they can travel together occasionally and understand one another’s work.
And he says he’ll never complain about working for National Geographic.
“You can sit there whining, but the things we get to see, no one else gets to see,” he said. “People with billions of dollars who are looking for that next great thing don’t even get to see what we see. You can’t buy these experiences, because no one’s willing to sit for three months.”
Two and a half years ago, Nicklen had another close call, not much different from the first one off the coast of Victoria.
“I was diving under the ice alone, chasing a 3,000-pound Atlantic walrus, which no one should be in the water with. And my regulator quit,” he said. Nicklen swam as hard as he could for the surface, risking the bends.
When he surfaced, he called Mittermeier. She had bad news: Nicklen’s friend and fellow National Geographic photographer Wes Skiles, who pioneered underwater cave shots, had died that day during a dive.
“That stuff hits you hard,” Nicklen said.
The Associated Press reported that Skiles had signalled to his dive team to indicate he was ascending because he was out of film. Several minutes later, they found Skiles’ body motionless on the ocean floor.
In a statement, National Geographic editor-in-chief Chris Johns called Skiles “a true explorer in every sense of the word.”Although each National Geographic photographer works alone, they meet at an annual seminar, which, to Nicklen, feels like a family reunion.
“You come together and realize that everyone’s shooting at an incredible level and they’re living their lives in the same fashion as you, for stories that they believe in,” he said.
Nicklen said what’s bothering him now is his loss of fear.
“It used to be a pretty clear line — if I step over that line, I’m going to be killed,” he said. But every day, he’s acting against his gut, entering dangerous situations. “The more you survive these close calls, the more you lose touch of that clear line.”
Sartore said Nicklen takes more risks than others in the field, partly because he chooses subjects in perilous places.
“The one big thing I tell him is you can’t take more pictures if you’re dead, Paul,” he said. “[But] this is his life. And if he dies on assignment, well, there are much worse ways to die, aren’t there?”The rewards come in moments like those spent waiting for the Kermode bear in northwestern B.C., a species threatened by loss of habitat due to logging and the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline. He and his assistant had agreed to take turns sleeping while they waited for the elusive white bear.
“But I never slept — I couldn’t. I kept listening to the ravens. I’d look across the river and there’d be a wolf staring at you. A constant parade of black bears in the area. The salmon going up the river,” he said. He never brings a book. “I have a hard time being in my world here and thinking that whatever an author can say in a book could be nearly as profound as this moment of sitting in the forest.”
Nicklen insists he doesn’t have a death wish. Getting in a car every day is more dangerous than the work he does, he says.
And if heaven is on his mind, it’s because he’s living in it. He just hopes he can convince other people.
“We spend so much time living our lives on this planet, as a stepping stone to get to the next life — heaven or whatever,” he said. “But when you see the things that I see, there’s no heaven that could be fabricated or designed in anyone’s minds. No one can visualize a heaven that could be even a fraction as amazing as what’s around us now.”
Paul Nicklen will give a soldout, free public lecture at UVic Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.
Several of Nicklen’s photos are featured at the Royal B.C. Museum as part of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibit, through April 1. Nicklen’s underwater photo of penguins was named the top photo in the international photo contest, from more than 40,000 submissions.