livebooks blog

© Ed Kashi

I remember when my son was only two years old and I was leaving for a two-month trip to Pakistan. As I was saying goodbye, I started to cry. Eli looked at me in puzzlement, not understanding why his father was crying, not understanding anything about what was happening and that I was leaving. Twelve years later now, Eli is 14 and my daughter Isabel is 11, and I still find myself needing to connect, to explain, to seek compliance or understanding from them when I leave them for my latest assignment — and more often than not, it doesn’t register with them.

Before a recent trip, I made sure to walk Isabel to school. When we got to the steps of the school, I wanted so badly for us to have a heartfelt goodbye. Instead, she ran off when she saw her friends and barely said goodbye to me. Did this mean she didn’t care? Or was she avoiding “dad’s emotional trips”? Or was she totally unaware of the moment’s importance to me because, for her, our frequent separation is standard operating procedure?

From an early time in my life of constant comings and goings, I’ve realized so much of what I’m going through, I’m going through alone, in isolation. Home has become a base for me, so when I leave it takes time to separate from it. And I never entirely do. Then, upon reentry, I reconnect with my wife and kids, yet I’m often already thinking about my next trip. This constant state of flux creates a sense of being suspended between worlds and always feeling isolated on some level from both — a suspended isolation.

On another trip, I’m flying above Pakistan, en route to Mumbai to teach another workshop, this one for Carlo Roberti who runs the Tuscany Photographic Workshops in Italy. I’m thinking about traces of the familiar. The many good luck charms that Isabel has given me over the years remain in my travel bag, a constant reminder of her warmth, love, good nature, delicious spirit.

My wife Julie rarely gives me mementos, just the constancy of her being, the comfort of knowing she is there and committed. While there is nothing tangible from her in my bag, knowing she is there keeps me going in my darkest hours. From Eli it’s a similar yet more confusing and troubled trace. His love and attention come only with cajoling. He is not forthcoming nor in need of showing me his love or affection. Without these physical and emotional gifts from my family, I’d truly be lost. I can’t imagine a wandering for love and comfort that could possibly replace the firmness of my family.

Part of my sensation of suspended isolation stems from my own personal neediness. I am way too dependent on being connected, and our current climate of digital connectivity only indulges me further. This really started with the cellphone but has accelerated with texting and the ability to have instantaneous communication from almost anywhere in the world. I am addicted. On a good day it’s a wonderful combination, where I feel productive, engaged in the world, and simultaneously connected to my family and studio. On a brooding day, I see it as a character weaknesses that keeps me from engaging deeply with my subjects.

My sense of this suspended isolation started before I even left for my recent trip to Holland and Syria. The morning of my departure it became clear I was already out of my kids’ minds. While saying goodbye, I was reminded that they are living lives entirely outside this internal drama of mine, which only reinforces my feelings of being alone, suspended between my here and there, my aloneness and our togetherness.

This feeling is a semi-permanent condition at this point. This trip has been easy in some ways and quite taxing in others. Syria makes me feel diminished and weak. I know when I get home and review the work, the story will be a success, and I will feel strong and secure. But for now, I am tired and searching for solid ground. That is home, I know. But home is fleeting for me right now. I love you, Isabel and Eli. Our lives are crazy and moving too fast. I hope you and I find a sweet eddy to chill in sometime soon.

Interestingly, the best antidote to all my inner bullshit (as my wife would not put it but clearly views it) is to just do great work. It’s amazing how much better I feel and how my feelings of isolation suddenly vanish after a great day of shooting, reporting…being engaged. When I’m in the field, my ability to find stories and my desire to report and record are what keep me going and allow me to “forget” about myself. When I already feel isolated, and I’m not finding ideas and stories — that’s when the mental games kick in and life starts to feel desperate.

I’ve observed this cycle over the years, and it’s interesting how I frequently come out of it. Just when I am so goddamn lonely, desperate, burned out and tired, hopeless and depressed — in a state where a normal person would take a mental health day or a vacation or check into the local rehab clinic — I’ll go out that day and have an amazing experience, a great shoot, a wonderful human encounter, or witness something that takes me out of myself. Suddenly I’m healed, re-energized and ready for more. It’s bizarre and runs counter to logic. But I’ve had it happen dozens of times in my career.

For now, my only way to deal with my suspended isolation is to just bull through the emotions. After an exhausting inner dialogue with myself, I pick myself up, dust myself off, and get on with things. Is there any choice? Over the years, the only thing I’ve learned to help me cope with this is that, experience shows, it’s always ok in the end. I will get through these periods of isolation, suspended between worlds. My work always turns out great, my moments of despair invariably pass, and I get home. The key is not to let the conflict in my heart and mind poison my relationships with unnecessary outbursts of anger and pain — so when I am home there is at least the opportunity for us to connect, to find the love and calmness that fills our lives with beauty and health.

Bioluminescent copepods called Metridia. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

Celia Gelfman, a technician on the research team, threw down the gauntlet one day while I was photographing in the lab: Capture the beauty of bioluminescence. I followed Celia to the walk-in refrigerator where the tiny crustaceans called zooplankton are stored. Celia presented me with a big jug of water. I could see a few translucent critters about the size of a pencil tip swimming around. Then Celia poured some of the water over a sieve, and wow! For a few seconds after the pour, neon-blue Metridia lit up and raced around the mesh. The challenge was on to find a way to photograph these glowing animals.

The goal of this scientific expedition to the Bering Sea is to understand how a warming climate is affecting the food web. Research teams on the ship are studying phytoplankton (microscopic marine plants), copepods like Metridia, and krill (larger zooplankton that resemble shrimp). These “charismatic microfauna” are found throughout the world’s oceans, and they are food for other zooplankton, fish, birds, and even whales. Among the many zooplankton species that scientists have collected on this expedition, one has a very special trait. Metridia, when disturbed, give off a neon blue light like an underwater firefly. This is called bioluminescence.

I enlisted writer Helen Fields to hold the sieve over the sink and we started experimenting. First, we turned off the overhead lights and blocked the fluorescent light leaking out from under a counter. In order to record only the light from the copepods, I needed the room to be dark. Next I set up my Nikon D700 and a 105mm macro lens on a tripod and aimed it at the surface of the sieve (using a flashlight to manually focus on the sieve). I was assuming that, just like lightning, the neon trails of moving Metridia would burn bright lines into a dark background during a long time exposure. The first exposure confirmed that they would indeed show up. It took a few more tries to find the perfect shutter speed (four seconds) and the best way to hold the sieve (duct tape, of course!) Lastly, the Metridia had to make an interesting composition. It took about an hour to make this image.

Tonight (May 11th), we arrive in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where this journey began nearly six weeks ago. I’d like to extend a big thank you to our sponsors, the National Science Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, for supporting the most important and fulfilling work I have ever done. I would also like to thank the RESOLVE blog for helping me get the word out about climate change science in the Bering Sea. What’s next? This July I’ll be trading sea ice for mosquitoes when I travel to eastern Siberia to document researchers studying arctic rivers and lakes. Visit the Polaris Project to follow our adventures.

Soy fields near Belterra, Para State, Brazil, with isolated Brasilan nut trees. ©Daniel Beltra

Miki Johnson: Tell me about this award and how it will work.

Daniel Beltrá: For me, the most exciting part of this award is the book. We are working with Stuart Smith, who is one of the best book designers in the world. Amongst others, he does books for Eliot Erwitt and James Nachtwey. The idea is to create a very limited edition book of only 500 copies. Prince Charles is going to offer it to prominent people, and heads of state around the world. There’s a conference in November and he’s going to be giving this book to many presidents as a personal present from him. All this is to gear up the world and get them to commit to stop tropical deforestation as a way to tackle global warming.

Of course every photographer that makes a book hopes that it will have some impact, but I’ve never seen one used at this level before. They have very clear ideas of how they want the book made: They only want it to be 70 or 80 pages; they want big pictures; and they want to reach an equilibrium between the biodiversity, the indigenous populations, the impending destruction and sustainable solutions. This is a worldwide problem so they don’t want to point any fingers or blame anyone — it’s everybody’s responsibility. Tropical deforestation creates 20% of the CO2 released, which is more than the entire transport sector in the world. If you stopped all the trains and the planes and the cars and boats in the world, you still would manage to drop the CO2 level more if you just stopped tropical deforestation, so it’s a no-brainer really. So what Prince Charles and his Rainforests Project want to do is create a huge fund where the world would put money for these countries so they don’t cut further and further.

I haven’t done a book before, so I’m excited but it’s such short notice it feels like a sprint for six months. Luckily there are a lot of very capable and talented people around me and that’s going to help a lot. Sony for example is putting so much effort in because they are launching a new line to the professional market. And they have great technology. We’re going to be doing exhibitions and they have these big weatherproof screens that can be set up outdoors to show the images.

Purple flowers of the Jambo tree in Bellterra, Para State, Brazil. ©Daniel Beltra

MJ: It sounds like you are on a pretty tight schedule. Is it hard working with NGOs sometimes that don’t have realistic expectations for how long photo projects take?

DB: I basically have three to four weeks per country to go to three places: the Brazilian Amazon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia, which is probably going to be Borneo and Sumatra. The shooting list they gave me originally was too wide, so we’re going to use some of my past photography, and that will help a lot. The portfolio I presented for this award was 30 of my best photographs. Those were images I made during nine years working in the Amazon. I’m not going to get the same thing in a few weeks. My personal idea was to have good photography drive the project and not a really specific shooting list, because there’s not really enough time for that. The Amazon is the size of the continental U.S. or Europe. You could spend weeks just trying to reach a particular spot. The distances are enormous and many of the places need to be reached by plane, so it’s a challenge. But I’m confident we’re going to produce a good piece.

MJ: It must have been interesting to find yourself sitting with the Prince of Wales, showing him your photographs.

DB: The commitment Prince Charles has made to this issue is really global. When we met in London and I was showing him my photos, he really knew a lot about the issues. He was saying, oh this is palm oil in Indonesia, I’ve been working with this and I went there last year. He’s very knowledgeable and he’s very passionate about the environment. There are so many people who are so high in the world, who could sit back and have a relaxed life, so it’s very humbling to see how committed he is.

Between Cuiaba and Manaus, Brazil. ©Daniel Beltra

It doesn’t make much sense. My career has been a complete snowball. I started in photography in 1988. And until 2005 I didn’t participate in a single competition. But in 2005, Tom Stoddart saw the story I did on the drought in the Amazon and he said, “You need to send this to the World Press.” And I was saying, “I don’t know.” And he said, “Daniel, please trust me, send this to the World Press.” And then a week before the deadline Tom called and said, “Did you send that to the World Press?” And I said no. He said, “Daniel, send it!” So I did — and I won an award.

That really opened the world for me. I went to Amsterdam and I met all these other photographers and I thought, wow, I don’t feel any more like this crazy guy who works 90% of his time on environmental issues, because at that time conservation wasn’t such a hot topic. In 2007 I got another World Press award then last year I got the inaugural Global Vision Award from Picture of the Year International (POYi) and I’ve gotten 10 big awards in 4 years. Then, a couple years ago, I was invited to join the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP). It was such an honor to be part of a group of dedicated photographers I had admired for so long. So it’s been a total rollercoaster for me.

So suddenly, you become a name in photography when a few years ago you were nobody. It doesn’t mean that much ultimately, and I don’t want it to go to my head. I want to have time to go and shoot. There are so many important stories that need to be told. But this publicity is also a great way to expose what’s happening to more people. So I am more and more open to doing exhibitions and giving talks, but it’s difficult to handle sometimes. And at the end of the day, I need to figure out how to make a better business decisions so I can hire help and have more time.

I remember until just a few years ago, when I would turn in a story to Greenpeace, who I work with a lot, I would just try to rest a little. Now it’s like I’m more busy when I come home than when I’m shooting. It’s almost a relaxation to go in the field. It’s like, no more email, no more phone, and whatever happens, I’ll deal with it when I’m back. Nobody is obliging me to do this, I am extremely lucky and can’t complain. But I want to make sure I’m maximizing the impact of my work and I also want to have a life.

"A little pop of light from a Nikon SB-900 speedlight zoomed to 200mm gave me what I was looking for," Chris explains about capturing this beautiful shot of sea ice. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

In addition to documenting the tools and techniques scientists are using to understand the Bering Sea ecosystem, my other mission here on the icebreaker Healy is to showcase the beauty of this otherworldly environment. A key part of that environment is sea ice. Sea ice is formed from the freezing of seawater, as opposed to icebergs and ice shelves, which are formed on land as compacted snow and ice and slide into the ocean. Sea ice ranges in thickness from paper-thin to up to ten feet. Most of the ice we have encountered has been between 1-2 feet thick. Seals and walrus use sea ice to nurse their newborn pups. Ice cores reveal brownish-green ice algae growing on the underside of the ice, which nourishes tiny animals, which in turn feed the rest of the web of life. Without sea ice, the Bering Sea would be a very different place.

You might imagine that ice pretty much looks the same-it’s all frozen water, right? Turns out that when water with salt in it freezes, it actually goes through a number of different phases, each one of them quite beautiful. While it’s hard to say which type of ice is my favorite (I’m an ice junkie; I love them all), I am particularly drawn to the broken up bits that mark the ice edge, where waves from the open ocean cause the floes to bump into each other and crack up into tiny jagged pieces, giving the ocean surface the look of a big jigsaw puzzle. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a stormy place. Cloudy days and gray skies have been the norm. So I am often looking for scene-setting icescape shots at the edges of the day just after sunset and before sunrise when the sky glows blue.

One of the tools in a photographer’s bag of tricks is the ability to stop action or blur it based on their choice of shutter speed. One evening as I watched the broken up chunks of ice slide past the side of the ship, I got the idea to shoot ice in an impressionistic way that conveyed that motion. I set up my tripod and connected a cable release. My first attempts, using just a several second shutter speed, rendered the ice as long wavy lines streaking across the frame. It was interesting, but almost too surreal. I needed to see some definition in the ice while retaining that sense of motion. A little pop of light from a Nikon SB-900 speedlight zoomed to 200mm gave me what I was looking for. I set it to a slow, rear curtain sync mode and blasted away at the moving ice again and again, hoping that just the right shapes would come into view at the right time. After a few dozen tries this composition floated into my frame.