Alaska – 2016

This powerful portrait of a huge coastal brown bear in Funnel Creek, Katmai National Park, Alaska works because of the eye to eye face off. My eye is level or indeed marginally lower than his and that required getting very wet. There are few dry days in the field in Alaska and this was not one of them.

Over and above our matching line of vision, the simplicity of the image is helped by the absence of distractions – there is clearly nothing in the print that is not part of the bear itself. A corner of distant tundra or sky would disturb the sense of the complete and create an eye grabbing tension point. This effect is only really possible with a “head on” perspective and it shows the vastness of adult bears. This bear probably weighed 950 pounds – five times that of an average man.

Encounters like this tend to be singular moments – with no other photographers nearby. In the salmon run seasons, great precision is required to know where the salmon are running on any particular week – with that comes clues as to where to find the bears. The greater the number of salmon in the river, the less a bear will worry about human presence; my trespass – once acknowledged – was accepted and life carried on. This bear was simply being a bear – he posed no threat.

Alaska 2017

​​I don’t tend to seek decisive moment images – I prefer serenity over intensity and a preconception based on action is difficult to linearly follow through to its conception. This is simply because action in the wild is a “crap shoot”. If it happens it happens, but it is not necessarily art in my book.
But this image is perhaps slightly different. The detail of the kill is raw and timeless and this may subliminally elevate the visual impact. This is how I imagine the denouement of a salmon to a big bear in Moraine Creek 5,000 years ago or even five million years ago. The main players in this image have been a constant in a world of huge change – salmon ran up this creek not just before we could google “Alaska” but before Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, the Roman Empire and the dawn of man. And at the end of their run, huge 1000lb bears were there to eat the salmon – just as in 2017. What an extraordinary planet we live on. It is the wildlife that is the constant and it is this wildlife that we are treating with such shameful disrespect.
Bears and humans are co-tenants of the planet – the bears have just shown their habitat greater respect. Any human that thinks he has sovereignty over a bear like this, did not see this guy in action that Friday in July. He could have killed any human in a heartbeat, except he chose not to. He was primeval.