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accepted her challenge. I called a photographer I had
known since childhood, Perry Conway. He said if this
was the real deal I should be prepared to
1. Go into debt
2. Live at home because “you won’t be making
any money at the start”
3. Go to Yosemite and train under Bill Neill
SF:
I know the photography of William Neill. He
won the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation
Photography from the Sierra Club in 1995
and is one of the great American landscape
photographers. Is it that easy to go train with him?
JW:
Well, that’s where Perry came in — he introduced
me to Bill. Then it
was
easy because Bill is so warm
and welcoming as well as being a truly great artist. I
stayed for two years; I didn’t just train under him, his
family became my family. I was shooting all color then
— Kodachrome with long lenses — but as you’d expect
in Yosemite, I began working with medium- and large-
format film as well. As much as I loved that mountain
wilderness, I was drawn ever closer to the ocean. Soon
all my spare time was spent at Point Reyes National
Seashore in California, where I would shoot and write
and think about how to intimately capture the seascape.
By 2000 I was back in Boulder living with my parents,
but I had a critical mass of significant images to justify
an art exhibit. A collector purchased $70,000 worth of
my prints from my show, and all of a sudden I had the
resources to take it to the next level. I didn’t blow the
money; I continued living at home and traipsed all over
the West looking for my next visual inspiration. I found
it in the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado’s San Luis
Valley. Every month for three and a half years I’d walk
deep into the dunes to camp and shoot, for a week at a
time usually. It was transformative. This was wilderness
in which I never saw another person.
Learning to appreciate that ecosystem’s intricate
connectivity filled me with joy. I was beginning to
understand conservation too, because a developer
bought the adjacent land with intentions to drill into
the crucial underlying aquifer and pump the water
to Denver. I watched in amazement as a coalition of
NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], the National
Park Service and even local ranchers aligned together
with the goal of keeping the water underground.
They actually stopped the development and saved the
dunes, demonstrating that conservation is not just
about protecting animals, it is about protecting people.
I wrote and published a photo book on the Great Sand
Dunes — my first book of poetry, if you will. But I
wanted my photography to be on the front line of a
very meaningful conservation story. I wanted to be a
driver, not just a reporter.
SF:
That’s still a long way from Antarctica
and your Last Ocean project, and I haven’t yet
discerned anything that really prepared you for the
kind of photography you did there.
JW:
The Ross Sea story found me in the fall of 2004
during a conversation with a high-school friend, Heidi
Geisz, who worked at Palmer Station, Antarctica, on a
penguin research team. She gave me a newly published
paper by Antarctic ecologist David Ainley titled
“Acquiring a ‘Base Datum of Normality’ for a Marine
Ecosystem: The Ross Sea, Antarctica.” In this paper,
Ainley lays out the story of the Ross Sea, presenting
evidence that it is the last large intact marine
ecosystem on Earth. A fast-expanding fishery in the
Ross Sea meant that this place would soon be gone. I
didn’t know much about the ocean at that point, and
the thought that there was one last undamaged place
was inconceivable. It kept me up at night. I wrote to
Ainley and requested a meeting. Two weeks later I met
him at his home in California. We enlisted each other
to tell this story and have worked together ever since.
The strategy that I initially imagined was to create a
tidal wave of media based on the most beautiful art I
could muster, build a global community and convince
legislators to enact protections. But really I wanted
to change global culture. How I would attempt that, I
had no idea.
I started by concentrating on the photography. The
story, obviously, was largely underwater, so I had to
learn underwater photography, and I had never dived.
Through another friend I approached the legendary
Bill Curtsinger. He set me on the path, but it would
take four years and more than 400 photography dives
(mostly in Bonaire, but also in northern Minnesota in
the winter for drysuit training) before I finally earned
the opportunity to dive under the ice.
In 2006 I cold-called Francesco Contini of Quark
Expeditions, which was sending an icebreaker to the
Ross Sea. By the end of the week he had offered full
support, enabling me and my new partner, filmmaker
Peter Young, to visit the Ross Sea for two months that
season. This finally brought me to the edge of the ice.
I went back to Antarctica once more with Quark
the following year. The year after that (the 2008-2009
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