noviembre 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.”
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.
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.
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 (Investigador submarino) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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