November 21, 2024 By Text by Stephen Frink; photos and captions by Alex Kirkbride
My philosophy is that if I am patient and respect the sea, Mother Nature might occasionally present me with a magnificent opportunity. My experience with a leopard seal in Antarctica was one of those times. At the end of a three-hour snorkel, I spotted the apex predator lounging on a piece of ice floe. My fatigue immediately disappeared, and I went into overdrive. I cautiously approached the 10-foot (3-m) seal, which poked its head over the 4-foot (1.2-m) ice wall’s edge and peered down at me. I felt vulnerable. The only way to reach the top of the ice floe where it rested was to kick like mad while I hoisted up my Seacam housing and wedged it slightly into the ice at the top. I had to shoot blind and hope the autofocus hit the seal and not the clouds behind it. I was very pleased with the result and pleasantly surprised when I noticed a krill in the seal’s mouth.
Alex Kirkbride
David Doubilet said it first and best. “He uses boundless imagination and a keen eye to peel back the surface and expose a world that is beautiful, bizarre, and wonderfully unexpected,” Doubilet said about Alex Kirkbride’s remarkable underwater photographic journey through all 50 states for his book American Waters. “[It is] a new and very surprising view of America, from the bottom up.”
When my son, Dylan, was born, my wife and I felt it was important for him to learn water safety skills as soon as possible. Some friends told us about Little Dippers, a course that teaches infants techniques such as kicking to the surface and floating on their backs. Babies are born with a dive reflex that enables them to control their breath for short periods of time underwater, but they lose this reflex after about six months. We enrolled Dylan in the course at 12 weeks old. One exercise was to briefly dunk him underwater. I could tell he enjoyed it, but I never knew how much until we were on holiday with my 9-year-old nephew, Johnny, who was snorkeling in the pool and saw Dylan smiling. My wife, Hazel, captured this image, which is my favorite father and son picture.
In early 2016 I traveled to the Arctic Circle Dive Center in the White Sea. I had recently committed to my ice project, and even though I was a certified ice diver, I wanted to reacquaint myself with this specialized diving. During my visit I had the opportunity to photograph beluga whales in a large open-water enclosure. They had been removed from aquariums and were in the process of being rehabilitated before being released back into the wild. These friendly and curious whales, with their flexible necks and humanlike expressions, weren’t shy and would tug on a fin or constantly nudge me if I wasn’t paying enough attention to them.
That book was published in 2007, 25 years after Alex and I first met. I was getting started in underwater photojournalism, and Kirkbride was opening a dive center in Jamaica. I didn’t know him as an underwater photographer then, and it was unlikely he knew himself as one.
When our paths crossed again a few years later, he was working as a dive guide at Rum Cay in the Bahamas. The guides were encouraged to take pictures of the guests and the reef flora and fauna, and Kirkbride availed himself of the free film and processing to gain experience and feed his nascent passion for underwater photography. When I saw his week-in-review slideshow, I remember thinking there was something special in his vision and a talent he should cultivate.
I was the first person in the water on the morning I took this shot for American Waters. As I dropped down into the funnel-shaped opening of Devil’s Eye cavern in Ginnie Springs near Williston, Florida, I felt a strong upwelling of 72°F (22.2°C) water. I grasped a large tree trunk wedged into the cave entrance at 15 feet (4.6 m) and let my legs hang free. Looking up, I saw one of the most unusual and spectacular underwater visuals. The sepia-hued, tannin-rich water was mixed with the clear spring water, creating a variety of warm orange colors. The spring water would overwhelm the tannins, clearly revealing the trees above the surface in a strange ebb and flow. As I waited for the right mix of river and spring water, a turtle swam overhead, followed a few minutes later by a resident school of mullets, and then the morning sky seemed to burst into flame.
In September 2005, after working on American Waters for three years, I was finally home in New York City. My goal was to capture at least one water image from every state, and I still needed one from Connecticut. After several weeks of rain, the weather cleared, so I went to the Housatonic River and discovered a small valley in the forest where the heavy rains had accumulated. Having found no images in the river, my instinct told me this area was my best chance for the final state. Returning at dawn, I waded into the shallow, 3-foot (0.9-meter) rain pond and experimented with the trees above. The idea worked, and I left the pond shocked. After traveling about 108,000 miles (173,809 kilometers) in 848 days and jumping into various waters a total of 945 times, I had finished the project. I was elated that I had achieved my goal but also overwhelmed because the greatest journey of my life had finally drawn to a close.
In June 2024 we were on a boat together for the first time since Rum Cay, this time on a liveaboard in the Galápagos. During the week I caught up on his career and asked to see what he was shooting these days. It wasn’t a carousel of slides this time, and the digital images on his laptop reminded me that he indeed had a special vision, validating Doubilet’s claim of “boundless imagination” and a “keen eye.”
I also learned some other things, including that — despite Kirkbride’s obvious British accent — he was born in New York City. For reasons unclear to the then-6-year-old, the family moved to England in 1966 so his dad, who then worked in magazine advertising sales for Condé Nast, could become editor of a food and wine magazine. Kirkbride’s earliest vision of the sea was from the deck of the Queen Mary for the seven-day cruise from New York to Southampton, England.
As any underwater photographer knows, you don’t always find what you’re looking for. I take that as a sign from Mother Nature to look elsewhere. On a manta night dive in Hawaiʻi for American Waters, the largest rays in the world were otherwise engaged. While I was waiting, I watched the endemic flagtail fish frantically eating the plankton attracted by the bright lights. I had an idea and began experimenting. I shot this image on film, so keeping the fish in the frame was tricky.
During the first year of my business, I made a deal with a travel agent to venture to the Galápagos on my first liveaboard trip. The boat was an old, minimally converted fishing trawler and was nothing like today’s luxurious liveaboards. The lack of amenities didn’t bother me, however, because I was in the Galápagos! Only four of us were on the boat, so we could make multiple dives and excursions every day. We had a memorable night dive under Pinnacle Rock on Bartolomé Island. One early morning I found this Pacific creole wrasse attracted by an intensely red starfish. I took this photo with a Nikonos 15mm lens, which was my favorite piece of equipment for many years.
The voyage, however, didn’t motivate a deep immersion into all things ocean. Kirkbride’s childhood was mostly about sports. There were only three television channels, none of which broadcast Sea Hunt or the Jacques Cousteau documentaries. His first significant experience in the water happened in Malta, where his mother took an introduction to scuba course while Kirkbride snorkeled above. His father took him to Greece around the same time, and the Mediterranean’s color and clarity mesmerized him. There was a nibble of interest, but still no bite.
In 1979 Kirkbride attended Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England, majoring in history, English, and art history. He took a photography course there but soon sensed that academic life wasn’t the right fit. After doing odd jobs around London for 18 months, he saved enough money to return to New York, where he enrolled in a scuba class. His checkout dives were in the Florida Keys around the same time I moved to Key Largo.
Years ago I was in Belize working on an article about kayak diving for Scuba Diving magazine. The writer and I paddled past this juvenile mangrove tree in the turtle grass every morning on our way to the reef. I knew the art director would not be interested in the image I had envisioned, so I waited until the job was finished. On the last morning before we departed South Water Caye, I waded into the shallows and produced this split-level image with ISO 100 film.
The North and South Poles have fascinated me since my teenage years, and I always dreamed of exploring these distant regions. My chance came in 2016, when I was part of an expedition to Antarctica on a 60-foot (18-m) sailboat. The beginning of the journey was challenging. It took us almost a week to cross the Drake Passage from Argentina due to the lack of wind. Once we reached the peninsula, we were stuck in a little bay for three days as a vast iceberg blocked the entrance. The wind finally changed, and we snuck through a small opening between the rocky shore and the ice. After that delay the weather held, and we had nine days of uninterrupted shooting. One morning while cruising around in the tiny inflatable, we encountered a group of inquisitive Weddell seals. Three seals came right up to me and hung around for almost an hour.
A predictable dive industry trajectory followed after his certification, including scuba instructor training in Hollywood, Florida, a job in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and subsequent gigs in San Salvador and Rum Cay in the Bahamas. It deviated in 1985 when he moved back to Manhattan, New York, to teach underwater photography and be a freelance photography assistant. He worked for high-end commercial and fashion photographer Albert Watson, and the next two years were a whirlwind. Imagine working for 42 days straight, going from London to Paris to Milan to tweak lighting and do test shoots and custom darkroom printing. It was the full gamut of the fashion photography world. Being an assistant in the late 1980s was essentially an apprenticeship, but to build a career as a professional shooter you still needed a portfolio to show potential clients.
In that portfolio-building era, Kirkbride purchased a used Aquatica housing for a Nikon F3 and went to Grand Cayman to shoot some portfolio images. His wife at the time was a highly successful fashion model, and he shot an over/under photo of her flicking her hair, using a fast shutter speed to freeze the water.
I am continuously looking for unusual objects to photograph and had heard about the Molinere Bay Underwater Sculpture Park in Grenada, which intrigued me. The artificial reef had been in the water for six years at that time. Sponges and corals had grown on the sculptures’ faces, creating some wonderfully strange beings. This face, which I call Cyclops, is one of the most interesting ones I found.
At the boarding school I attended in Kent in southeast England, our history teacher used to conduct lessons in the old air raid shelter. He had been a Spitfire fighter pilot and regaled us with war stories at lunchtime. All the young boys were enthralled, and my interest in World War II was cemented at an early age. Consequently, Chuuk Lagoon was always on my diving to-do list. I found this Japanese gas mask on the wreck of the Nippo Maru in 120 feet (37 m) of water. It was right at the end of the dive, so I was low on air and had to be quick. Three shots later I began my ascent.
While that concept is perhaps a cliché today, it was fresh and inventive then, and Kirkbride made $5,000 on that stock photo. He had photographed interiors, models, and still life, but now there was an incentive for underwater. He received assignments from Rodale’s Scuba Diving magazine and worked extensively for them over the next five years.
Like most photographers, Kirkbride had a coffee-table book in mind. Instead of a traditional “best of” portfolio, he wanted to have an underwater photo from every U.S. state. By 2002, with sponsorship from Eastman Kodak for film and processing, he was committed to the American Waters project.
He would be on the road for 28 of the next 36 months, living out of an Airstream trailer. His fiancée, Hazel, had been living in England but joined him on this grand new adventure. It is a testament to their relationship that they shifted from a long-distance arrangement to sharing an Airstream for months at a time. By September 2005, the book was complete, but it took another two years to get it published. Add tenacity to the list of descriptors for Kirkbride.
Swimming with Rajan, who lived on India’s Havelock Island (now Swaraj Dweep), ranks among one of my truly memorable encounters. While the elephant began to walk into the water, I slowly moved toward him. Rajan gradually gathered momentum until it looked like he was flying. He lifted his long trunk out of the water about every 15 seconds, using it like a snorkel. The world’s last ocean-swimming elephant seemed relaxed and happy to be in the sea but also completely aware that I was alongside him. I had to be very careful with my positioning — one wrong move and one of his immensely powerful feet would knock me out. At one point I was a little too close, so Rajan instinctively moved away. The dive lasted a mere 17 minutes, but it was a thrilling and unforgettable experience.
My research indicated that eastern Greenland was a promising destination for ice diving. The town of Tasiilaq sits on a bay, which is the perfect place for icebergs to drift in during the summer months and become trapped by new surface ice in the winter. I was looking forward to photographing multiple icebergs, but only one remained after several freak storms. Thankfully, it was a stunning example. I spent 18 hours over eight days on this 60-foot-deep (18-m) berg. Ultimately, it was to my advantage, as the situation forced me to keep looking for new angles, which I would never have found if I had been bouncing around to several dive sites.
An exhibition of 23 photos from the book in 40- by 60-inch (1- by 1.5-meter) prints at the prestigious Hammer Galleries in Manhattan brought Kirkbride fully into the fine art world. American Waters garnered critical acclaim, and the exhibits did well enough to allow him and Hazel to move back to England to begin a family. Their son, Dylan, was born in 2009.
Kirkbride was late to digital photography but was all in by 2010, using a Nikon D3X to provide the resolution he needed with big full-frame files for large fine art prints. His Seacam housing was very robust, an attribute he came to value as he continued his journey beneath the ice.
An IMAX film on the Arctic with a six-second underwater sequence inspired him to start training for ice diving in 1995 in the Canadian High Arctic, and he retrained in 2016 in the White Sea off northwestern Russia’s coast. With improved thermal protective gear and better technique, he eventually made dives of up to two hours beneath the ice. His longest ice dive was 142 minutes on a 15-liter (125-cubic-foot) tank of air.
These poisonous sea snakes are inquisitive and attracted to movement in the water. Even though they are not aggressive, they can come very close to divers. I saw one slither between a woman’s BCD and her wetsuit, but she stayed calm and was not a threat. This was my second time in the Banda Sea region, so I knew to watch for them potentially cruising into my frame. I was working on a hard coral study on an early morning dive in the Banda Sea when I spotted the black-and-white krait moving toward me along the wall. It swam into the most perfect position I could have imagined.
During the 1994 Amazon expedition, the nearest I could get to a pink river dolphin was about 200 feet (61 m) — a fleeting glimpse from the riverboat but just long enough to catch the pale color of its skin. When I returned in 2019, I could snorkel with them in a tributary of the Rio Negro. I photographed these highly intelligent mammals from a shallow wooden platform as they nibbled my legs to tease me. The water was so dark I couldn’t see them coming, but I knew they were messing with me. Each time I jumped and laughed. At one point the guide, who was wearing a black rashguard, slipped down into the tannin water, and the dolphin responded. This unmanipulated image appeals to my sense of surrealism.
Familiarity and comfort in this unique and seldom-seen environment allowed him to concentrate on its beauty, and these dives will culminate in another book and more gallery exhibitions. Why the obsession with ice these days?
“Apart from the creative desire, my need to say something visually about climate change drives the ice project,” Kirkbride said. “It has become especially important since I brought a child into this world 15 years ago.” AD
