AN INDIAN AT THE NORTH POLE

Banerjee’s photographs—a constellation of snow geese feeding on cotton grass; a migrating herd of Porcupine caribou forming a black-dotted line on white snow; tracks of a polar bear mother and her cubs leading to their den in the snow; a Buff-breasted Sandpiper frolicking in the snow; Capitate lousewort pushing through summer snow; moose rummaging for fodder; a male and female loon swapping places on their nest to share the duty of tending the eggs—instead showed that the land of perceived nothingness is replete with life. And that it could be endangered by oil and gas exploration. (In the Seventies, drilling was allowed in parts of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. With the US administration leasing land to oil majors, exploration will start soon in other parts along the Arctic Ocean.)

Far from being remote, says Banerjee, the Arctic is the most connected place on earth. “It is a metaphor of the interconnectedness of our planet,” he says. Hundreds of millions of birds migrate from all corners of the world to the Arctic in the summer, he says, including the Bluethroat from Bharatpur, Rajasthan and the Yellow Wagtail from Kolkata and Hodal, in Haryana. The Arctic is also the world’s poison dump. Toxins emitted from oil refineries and other industrial units all over the world are carried by wind and ocean currents to the region. Industrial chemicals have found their way into the food chain, points out Banerjee. “In fact, such is the extent of poisoning that the breastmilk of a woman in Greenland is more toxic than a woman in Kolkata,” he says.

Banerjee doesn’t mind it much that his photographs have been used without credit by many agencies. “I am happy that my photo has become authorless. That’s why it has done what I could have not done for it,” he says.  His nonchalance perhaps derives from the fact that he wasn’t a professional shutterbug to begin with. Neither did he think he would ever become one. “In my life, there are no straight lines. The route by which I arrived in Alaska was as spontaneous as my wanderings across the Arctic tundra,” he says.
Born in Behrampur, West Bengal, to a banker father and an accountant mother, Banerjee studied electrical engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. In 1990, he moved to the US for further studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He then landed a job as a researcher and, about the same time, joined the Sierra Club, an environmental NGO. He had “no idea about ecology”; he just wanted some adventure. So he went out on skiing, trekking and kayaking trips across the wilderness in southern America, clicking away with a large Minolta 35 mm camera.

In 1996, he moved to Seattle, with a job at Boeing. He also joined the Boeing photography club where one of his images—a silhouetted black-tailed deer against a mountain and a lake—was voted “Slide of the Year”. “I thought, maybe I could be really good at this. It gave me confidence and I began to seriously contemplate a career in photography,” he says.  

Banerjee quit Boeing in early 2000 and started from scratch. He travelled across sanctuaries in North America to study wildlife. He got the first taste of the Arctic when he went to Churchill in Canada. In 2001, he decided to visit Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a land with incredible diversity of life but very limited visual documentation. The 19.8 million-acre refuge has 36 species each of animal and fish and over 180 species of birds that converge there from all over the world. It is also the most contested public land in American history. For over 30 years now, the Congress has been debating about whether to open it to oil and gas development or preserve it. “There’ve been umpteen media stories and botanical studies done on the ANWR and yet I realized the few photographs of the land were shot only during summer,” he says. Banerjee smelt opportunity and decided to photograph the place all year round.
He embarked on his trip, spending every penny he had saved till then—$80,000—and borrowed $60,000 from friends and institutions. He landed there on March 19, 2001. The temperature was -90 F, the season’s coldest day and a blizzard was on. “My camera froze instantly. I panicked. What the hell am I, a man from Kolkata, doing here? This is way beyond me. But Robert Thompson, my Inupiat guide, reassured me and I trusted him. And then, it was one baby-step at a time,” he says. The blizzard lasted 25 days and in such harshness, Banerjee saw a mother polar bear and her cubs walking out of the den. “That was an epiphany. I thought that if such harshness could support life, I better record it,” he says. For 14 months, Banerjee, armed with a 35 mm Nikon camera, travelled 3,000 miles on foot and by snowmobile, feeding on moose, caribou and whale meat and nearly losing his toes to frostbite.
His grit paid off. Photographs of his first Arctic expedition were published in the book Seasons of Life and Land with the foreword written by former US president Jimmy Carter. On March 19, 2003, senator Boxer showed his photographs in a debate over oil drilling in the Arctic and urged her colleagues to visit an exhibition of his photographs at the government-funded Smithsonian museum. The museum got cold feet and Banerjee’s photos were removed from the primary hall. But the controversy catapulted him to fame.
Though Banerjee basked in this unexpected fame, he was also scared. “First, I was under a $100,000 debt. My project’s expenses had gone through the roof. And then there were powerful senators such as Ted Stevens who publicly called me a liar. I was an outsider speaking on contentious issues and the post-9/11 xenophobic backlash hadn’t yet faded,” he says.  

Five years on, Banerjee is more confident. He is awaiting his solo exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Art gallery in Beverly Hills, LA. His works were on display at the United Nations headquarters, alongside those of six other international artists, at a show called “Art changing attitudes towards the environment” that ended on May 31. Fumio Nanjo, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, has nominated Banerjee for the Prix Pictet Prize 2008, a premiere award for sustainability photography. Vanity Fair, which profiled him in 2003, approached him last year to take photographs of Siberia’s permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerful greenhouse gas is bubbling from the ground. The photographs were published in the magazine’s May 2008 special “green” issue.
Banerjee does not shoot too many photos. In the last eight years, he’s shot about 100 with his medium-format Nikon camera. He also does not want to jump on to any wildlife bandwagon. “I am not a chest-thumping activist. My work is a reflection of years of thought and engagement.” Which is why he has no concrete plans for India. “I have become a bit of an outsider for my country,” he says. “But I am afraid that the tremendous progress India is making may destroy her ecological fabric. If we pollute the rivers the way China has done, it would be a serious issue.”
For now, though, his creative energy is spent in the Arctic. How does he define his relationship with that region? “It’s the place where I learnt to see.”