Subhankar Banerjee's Arctic Odyssey Interview by Jeff Wignall
In a storyline that sounds more like the plot of a modern-day Jack London novel than a self-assigned photo project, photographer Subhankar Banerjee did something most of us only fantasize about. With virtually no history as a professional photographer (he had never published a single photograph) or an adventurer (he had never even been to Alaska before), Banerjee cashed in his life savings, his 401K and tossed aside his 9-5 life (and some of his friends might argue, his sanity) and headed north—way north—to pursue a dream. For two years Banerjee lived the life of a nomadic trekker in the most remote of remote wildlife refuges: the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The result of his daring experiment is the first major monograph published on the refuge--Seasons of Life and Land (The Mountaineer Books, 2003). Banerjee also became the focus of a national media storm when a promised exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution was threatened with cancellation under the weight of political pressure after a California Senator held his book up on the floor of the United States Senate and admonished the entire Senate to read it before voting to allow oil drilling in the refuge.
Strangely enough, however, the 36-year-old native of Calcutta, India (who only began taking pictures seriously four years prior to his expedition) never started out with either publishing or political ambitions. “I wanted to be a nature photographer and I was just looking for a place where I could live and work in an untrammeled environment and northern Alaska seemed like a possibility,” he says. “I just wanted to go and be there and live with the native people and learn from them. I had absolutely no ambitions to do a book.”
Indeed, standing beside Banerjee in the cozy Gerald Peter’s gallery in upper-Manhattan on a bright autumn afternoon, it becomes obvious that no one is more surprised by the remarkable success—or controversy--of his project than he is. As we walk from print to print, he recounts in tones that still sparkle with amazement some of the more dramatic details of his Arctic odyssey: Like being tent-bound with his Inupiat guide and companion, Robert Thompson, for 29 days in a blizzard. And of getting frostbitten while photographing a rare red variation of the Northern Lights (a display his guide hadn’t seen since 1958) in temperatures of 50-below zero.
Banerjee recalls too his first days in the Arctic, which he says could not have been less auspicious: “The day I landed in March was the coldest day of the season; the temperature was 40 below zero,” he says. “Robert and I went out for a snowmobile ride that evening and the wind started blowing like crazy and the wind chills dropped to 80 or 90-degrees below zero. My Nikon F5 frozen instantly and I panicked, all I could think was “Wow, what am I going to do now? I’ve got to get out of this place!”
Reassured by Thompson and his wife that he would adjust to the conditions, Banerjee’s panic subsided and, after switching to more mechanically based cameras (Nikon F4’s and FM2’s and a Mamiya 645), he began to realize he could survive—and even flourish—in the extreme environment. All told Banerjee estimates that he and his guide traveled over 4,000 miles by foot, snowmobile, raft, kayak and bush plane through the 19.5 million acre wilderness.
So how does a computer scientist from Calcutta end up homeless on the Alaska frontier? “What happened is really more like a life’s journey for me because I was a painter when I was a child and my grand uncle was a painter in India,” he recalls. “Art has been with me all of my life and I struggled to get back to art, but having come from a middle-income family you don’t think of going into art to make a living.”
While living in New Mexico (where he moved from India in 1990 to take a job in computer science), Banerjee became enthralled by the beauty of the outdoors and returned to painting. He also took his first course in photography. A few years later, after moving to Seattle to work for Boeing, he became involved in the Mountaineer’s Club there and began a more serious devotion to outdoor photography. Unlike most 9-5ers who get smitten by the freelancing bug, Banerjee was not content to leave it as a distant desire. “I did four years of amateur photography but then I realized that maybe I was ready to take that leap and leave science behind,” he says.
With little hesitation, he did just that. After kicking around a variety of wild places in search of a subject that matched his passion, he got his first taste of the Arctic on a trip to photograph polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba—but it was a bittersweet attraction. “I came back with good photos but it was a very disappointing experience. You would see one bear and eight large vehicles would converge—it was not something I was looking for,” he says. “I began to do research on the Internet and found out about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I guess that opposites attract because the Arctic intrigued me.”
After several months of communicating with staff biologists at the refuge, Banerjee set the project in motion—with absolutely no goal for its outcome. “My mom always used to quote a saying in the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Just keep working, don’t look for the fruits that the work will bring.’ And that is the philosophy I followed in this project. It was very challenging but I never really wondered what the product would be like, I just wanted to do it.”
With the help of the biologists, Banerjee found Thompson who, though he had never worked with a photographer, was willing to take the unusual assignment. Thompson introduced his charge to the wilderness in small doses. “We did very small trials—we would go out for a day and come back the same day. Then we would go out and do an overnight trip, then maybe a three-day trip. He prepared me slowly.”
Those short outings, it turned out, would seem likes child’s play compared to what lay ahead: On one outing to photograph a mother polar bear and two young cubs a blizzard kept them afield for a solid 29 days. “We were observing this one den and we had built an ice blind not far away and the second day we saw the mother bear and the cubs. But they went back in and the blizzard started blowing and it blew for almost a month—we had only four calm days.” They never saw the bears again.
Unable to sacrifice precious fuel to cook in the blizzard, the pair lived off of Army rations and passed the time fantasizing about gourmet meals. “Honestly, when you’re in a blizzard you have to learn to enjoy it,” he says. “One thing Robert taught me is that in the Arctic you can never be in a hurry. You have to give up your hurried experience back home.”
Banerjee and Thompson’s epic journey was broken up into two seven-month stints: the first ran from March to November of 2001 and the second during the same months the next year. Between November and March, he says, the conditions simply become too intolerable and daylight is limited to just a few twilight-like hours.
During the off months Banerjee traveled to Manhattan and Washington, DC in search of charitable funding to continue the project. “I had run out of money very quickly—by the first summer,” he says. (Overall the project cost Banerjee $250,000--$80,000 of which came from personal savings, $60-70,000 from grants leaving him $100,000 in personal debts.)
Luck (or perhaps destiny) it seems was on his side. During this time he was introduced to an editor from the The Mountaineer Books who gave him a book contract based on literally a handful of prints--and his apparently eloquent gift for relating his story with passion. “She knew nothing about me. She met with me for fifteen minutes and said, ‘I’m going to do this book with you.’”
Almost simultaneously he took another leap of faith that would have a profound impact on the project. “During this time I thought, well, I now have a publisher, what if I try to get an exhibit? And so I called up the Smithsonian, literally from the website, and out of the weirdest lark the director of public programs picked up and I said ‘Can I send you a proposal?’ and he said, ‘Sure’”. Banerjee met with the curator a few days later and was promised a full solo exhibit. “I don’t know what he saw in my pictures, but he had also done a lot of research up in the Brooks Range, so he knew how difficult it was to survive that land, let alone come home with fine art.”
By the time he returned in March of 2002 for his second sojourn with new financing, a promised book contract and a show coming up, Banerjee says his mood had approach had changed radically: “The first year was a little bit of a panic in the sense that I had taken this project on, money was running out and I knew that at least I should be documenting a few things,” he says. “I had this documentary impulse, this feeling I had to do a sort of photographic survey—I was running around like a photojournalist. It was a very rushed kind of experience.”
During the second year, though, the photographer says his pace became more meditative. “I went into a much more contemplative mode. I was no longer in a rush and that is when I created most of the photography.”
But while life had become peaceful in the north, the debate about opening the Alaksa National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling was heating up in Washington, D.C. And the Smithsonian exhibition that Banerjee had won so easily was about to come crashing down. “In December of 2002 I had sent my portfolio to the Smithsonian and they were so impressed that they decided to do the exhibit in Hall 10—the most prestigious gallery in the Smithsonian,” he says. “We did several months of planning and design and I worked very closely with the Smithsonian staff.” The Smithsonian even hired Banerjee’s book editor to write detailed captions for the images. It appeared that everything was all approved for the show.
But on March 19, 2003, during a budget debate on the Senate floor, California Senator Barbara Boxer introduced an amendment to prevent oil drilling in the ANWR. During her arguments Boxer held Banerjee’s book up on the Senate floor and urged the senators to look at the book--and at his upcoming exhibit at the Smithsonian--before writing the region off as a “…flat white nothingness” as it has described by U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
The Boxer-Chafee Amendment was adopted by a very narrow vote, 52-48, and two weeks later the photographer got a chilling call from Smithsonian curator Robert Sullivan telling him that there was pressure to cancel the show. “He told me that the show would still be hung, but it was moved from to a basement gallery,” says Banerjee. “And all interpretive text was to be removed.”
Shortly after Banerjee and his publisher began to receive what Vanity Fair writer Ingrid Sischy describes, in a major story about controversy surrounding the relocated show, as “confusing and intimidating letters” from the Smithsonian’s lawyers demanding that all references to the Smithsonian Institution be stripped from any future editions of the book. “The Mountaineers Books is a small non-profit publisher in Seattle and getting threatened by a huge organization like the Smithsonian was a scary thing,” says Banerjee.
Word of the show’s near cancellation got out to the press, however, and only brought greater notoriety to the photographs and to the ANWR conflict itself. In addition to the Vanity Fair story, the Washington Post wrote five stories on the Smithsonian’s actions. “When I started this project, I actually didn’t know anything at all about the political background of this place,” he says. “My only interest was to live and work in this land. But from the beginning, it became very political.”
Still, he says, politics never entered into his artistic work: “I never allowed anybody to tell me what to bring back. It was very much an artistic and a spiritual quest.”
Text and Photography Copyright 2006 Jeff Wignall
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