Читать книгу Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders - Страница 13

I left Alaska pretty much the way I’d arrived: barreling along the snow-covered highway with all my worldly possessions piled high inside the car. Bigger car, more stuff, but otherwise . . .

In my five years there, I had discovered a place where I seemed to belong. I had a job, a community of friends and colleagues, the stirrings of a normal life. And I was throwing it all away to bound off, again, into the unknown.

This time, I went to San Francisco to try working freelance again. Within seventy-two hours of arriving at my new home, I knew in the very core of my being that, in a lifetime defined by wrong turns and missed opportunities, this was the worst decision yet. I was in a big city with few friends, no clients, little work, and less money. Yet somehow, I stumbled into an assignment contract for Microsoft gazillionaire Bill Gates’s new digital photography archive. It was a new concept at the time, and I believe the term “Digital Alexandria” was bandied about, without irony. Their goal was to collect images of everything in the world, through time. They even invented a new word for the company, Corbis, which I think is Latin for “bottomless money pit.”

My job description boiled down to “anonymous content provider,” and they sent me off to Canada for four months with a fat per diem and a mission to travel across the country and photograph everything I saw, from Mounties in red serge and funny hats to Ontario steel mill workers. I drove from the lush green British Columbia rainforest more than four thousand miles to the distant Atlantic shores of Newfoundland, and then raced to their Seattle headquarters in time to crash the office Christmas party. My corporate masters, deciding my modest talents were best appreciated from a greater distance, shipped me off to Australia for another three months with only the barest hint of direction.

Jet lag and anxious uncertainty were cushioned only by a seemingly bottomless expense account and ready access to that night’s hotel mini-bar. I’d call my editor (collect) in a panic, practically begging him for some guidance. I could imagine him sitting serenely cross-legged on some snow-covered mountaintop, ponytail blowing on the wind, imperturbable.

“What am I supposed to be shooting?”

Everything.

“Who are our clients? Who’s going to buy this shit?”

Everyone.

Ommmmmmm . . .

Too soon, the river of cash dried up, but I knew there was no going back to the old newsroom grind. A dream gig shooting for National Geographic always hung in the horizon like some shimmering mirage—there can’t be a photographer out there who hasn’t imagined their pictures displayed on the magazine’s yellow-bordered cover. Yet I never quite mustered the energy to chase down that dream; it seemed there was an impregnable wall barring access to those hallowed pages. I figured I’d die of old age before they would ever pay me to go on the trips I dreamed of. I was impatient and unwilling to devote endless hours to courting editors and pitching ideas. So, I never bothered asking. I cared only about the work, and it was so much easier to go out and spend my own money and just do it. I declared to myself, my folks, and my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend that I was now, officially, a nature photographer.

These self-financed trips started out simply enough. I bought a well-used VW camper van and disappeared for weeks at a stretch. I started with baby steps, ticking off the photographic hot spots of the American West. I had just moved to Seattle, and Mount Rainier loomed right outside my apartment’s kitchen window. Yosemite or Monument Valley were just a few days’ drive down the interstate.

Looking back, I recognize that I didn’t make a single picture that hadn’t been done before. I studied the masters of my craft—everyone from Ansel Adams to Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, and Frans Lanting—and I did everything I could to make my photographs look like theirs. I went to the same places, set up my tripod in the same spots, and shot mile after mile of old 35 mm slide film. For years my trip research, such as it was, consisted of buying the relevant Lonely Planet guide, booking a cheap online ticket, and taking a quick look through my stacks of old National Geographics for any heroic images I might be able to replicate. The very nature of photographing iconic locations is the act of framing and recording scenes that have been shot over and over for decades, and there’s a vanishingly small distance between “inspiration” and plagiarism. I’m ashamed to admit how often my toe slid over that line, unintentionally or not.

I made just enough money each month from royalties and the occasional magazine job to keep the lights on at home, fill up the gas tank, and keep moving. I saved enough for my first big plane ticket in 1998: a cheap round-trip steerage-class seat from Seattle through London and on to Cape Town, South Africa, where I rented a chartreuse VW subcompact and set off on safari. I didn’t know a damn thing about Africa I hadn’t seen on TV, but I wasn’t about to let that stand in the way. I subsisted on a steady diet of lemon cookies, Simba brand potato chips, and a canned curry that looked, smelled, and (I imagine) tasted a lot like cat food. I soon discovered a new world of large and dangerous animals whose forbearance I sorely tested.

Back home, picture agencies were busy sending my images off to clients: magazine and book publishers, advertising agencies, and PR firms. I never had to personally meet or charm a single one of those editors and art directors. It seemed like the best kind of magic. All on their own, they paid perfectly good money to use my pictures, when they fit the bill, to illustrate stories and campaigns. Each month, royalty money flowed in, and I responded in the only way I knew how: I spent it, and fast.

My trips grew longer, more ambitious, and more expensive. I bought a beat-up Land Cruiser in South Africa and drove from Johannesburg, through the safari lands of Tanzania and Kenya, all the way to Uganda. I spent months photographing the wildlife and landscapes I encountered while camping rough in the bush. The calendar didn’t have enough days for all the trips I wanted to do. Scouring the internet for cheap flights, I discovered Cathay Pacific offered a twenty-one-day air pass to anywhere they flew in Asia. I managed to visit twelve countries in those three weeks, touching down just long enough to get some local bhat, dong, or rupees at the airport ATM and race around to the most glaringly obvious highlights before catching a taxi back to the airport in time for my next flight.

With every Americana road trip or African safari or Antarctic boat charter, I imagined that I was pushing the photographic bar a little higher. But for the most part, I was just one more crappy wedding singer belting out cover versions of somebody else’s greatest hits.

It was in Greenland, of all places, that I had my epiphany. Cold and remote, and stupendously expensive, the place was not yet on anybody’s bucket list. I set off with no real notion of what I’d find. I traveled by boat and camped along the western coast, surrounded by dramatic fjords, glaciers, and icebergs like nothing I’d ever encountered. Hell, I hadn’t even seen pictures of these places. I had no visual framework, no pre-existing iconic images to “interpret.” Without other photographers’ work to fall back on, I finally had to wake up and create images that were, for once, truly my own.

All of this was great fun, while it lasted. Making a living at photography, always a dubious proposition, has only grown harder in recent years. The advent of digital photography collapsed the distance between the professional photographer and the eager enthusiast. Advanced cameras made exposure and focus automatic. “Point and shoot” was once a pejorative for a crappy little camera; with the new digital equipment it became all the technical instruction anyone needed to call themselves a photographer.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in global travel. Places that once required insider knowledge, a pile of cash, and a full-blown expedition to reach are now overrun by swarms of tourists. From Machu Picchu to the Serengeti, from Angkor Wat to Uluru, worlds that were first exposed on the pages of National Geographic are now trampled by hordes of smartphone-wielding, selfie-shooting vagabonds. Visiting America’s national parks often as not feels like a tour of the country’s most scenic and overcrowded parking lots. Even driving my old Land Cruiser through Africa was rarely the solitary affair I had hoped for. I once counted twenty-three trucks surrounding one luckless cheetah, and witnessed lion-inspired traffic jams that rivaled rush hour in Shanghai.

This is as good a time as any to confess it all: my shameless hypocrisy, my surpassing selfishness, my burgeoning misanthropy. I want gorgeous landscapes and stunning wildlife and exotic travel, preferably without too much in the way of personal discomfort or heavy lifting, and I want it all to myself. I want it for the solitude that quiets the din in my head, for that clean break from all the distractions of home and modern living, and for a brief opportunity to settle the hell down and get to work making pictures. I’ve blazed a weaving and erratic career trail, but if I had to describe my shtick, it’s this: Go far. Go long. Go alone.

That original VW camper was a pretty good starting point for independent travel, offering the open road and a bit of wandering hippie street cred I otherwise lacked. My African truck was a fine next step, permitting months of wilderness travel, rooftop tenting, and off-road shenanigans. In between, over a decade of summers, I puttered around in woefully undersized, inflatable dinghies across hundreds of miles of northern coastal waters. It made sense in so many ways; it was cheap, required no formal training, and yet was so dangerous and uncomfortable that no one was likely to follow. As a bonus, out on the water, I could go just about anywhere I damn well pleased.

It occurred to me that what I needed next—more than retirement savings, more than the comforts of home, or the love of a good woman—was a real boat.

C-Sick aground at low tide, Windfall Harbor, Alaska