Paul Nicklen is a Canadian photographer, conservationist and cofounder of SeaLegacy. He has received more than 30 of the highest awards given to photographers in his field, including the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the prestigious World Press Photo for photojournalism. In 2019, he received the Order of Canada, the centrepiece of Canada’s honours system that recognises a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. In Issue 14 of Oceanographic, we find out more about the man behind the lens.

Oceanographic Magazine (OM): You were born a long way from the ocean. When you were just four years old, your parents moved to Baffin Island, a place where the ocean and life are intertwined. Given the course your life has run since, do you attribute that move to fortune or fate?

Paul Nicklen (PN): If anyone were to ask me to go back to a defining period of my life, a run of years that truly shaped who I am today, it would be my childhood living with the Inuit of Iqaluit and Lake Harbour. I was thrust into a society and culture that fostered within me a deep love and understanding of the Arctic environment, enabled the development of unique and ancient survival skills and, perhaps most critically for the journey that has unfolded in the years since, emboldened my creative mindset. It was a truly formative time – my left brain learning the requirements for surviving in -45 degrees Celsius and 100mph winds, my right brain enraptured by Inuit ghost stories such as the sea monster Qalupalik, who pulled children beneath the ice.

I fell in love with the right brain creative process of storytelling, but was also learning to become tough – as kids we’d play games to see who could stay buried in a snowbank for the longest, or who was the last to stand the pain of wearing just a T-shirt outside during a storm. But it was the stories that mesmerised me – rich visuals of ghosts and great hunters on land. I was in awe of that storytelling process, as well as with the land and the seascape that formed the foundations of those stories, and that eventually manifested itself in art of my own. I think it would be fair to say that as soon as my family and I arrived on Baffin Island, my path was set.

OM: When did you first connect with the ocean?

PN: It was something that developed over the years. Even though Iqaluit, where we lived until I was seven years old, has the second highest tides in the world at 42ft, it wasn’t until we moved to Lake Harbour that I realised how central to life the ocean was. When playing out on the tidal flats you’d have to run back to safety when the tide turned because the water came in so fast. At a place called Soper Falls, the waterfall switches direction as the 40ft tide swings! Eventually, I started joining my dad and the Inuit hunting and traveling on the ice. On our way back from expeditions we’d have to wait for the tide to rise up by 30ft in places so that we could drive our snowmobiles off the sea ice and back onto land. Then, at the age of nine I got my first snowmobile. I started taking off on the ice, exploring and fishing with my friends. To be cut loose at that age, to be out there with wild animals, to be personally connecting with the environment and understanding the interconnectedness of it all, was illuminating. I truly fell in love.

OM: Your mother was a photographer. When did photography transition from a fascinating thing ‘mum did’ to something that was central to your own identity?

PN: Watching my mom convert her beautiful negatives into prints in the dark room in our humble little house was magical to me, but I didn’t ever think I could be a photographer. When you grow up in the North, there’s a feeling that you won’t ever be anybody. It’s a sentiment that permeates the entire community – or certainly did back then. For me and my peers, all we did was dream. We didn’t have a television. We didn’t have a telephone. In terms of material things, all I had were encyclopaedias and Jacques Cousteau books. I was always reading, dreaming or entertaining myself outdoors, scurrying about in the intertidal zone, turning over every rock with fascination, learning from the ocean, enthralled by the return of the huntsmen and the wildlife and nature they encountered.

On a family excursion to Italy when I was 15 years old, my mom lent me her Pentax K1000. To be seeing the world through a camera was fascinating to me. I loved it, but never did I think I was going to be a photographer or explore underwater like Jacques Cousteau. Years later, at university, while walking back from class late one evening, I saw a notice advertising scuba diving. Up until that moment, underwater exploration had always felt out of reach for someone like me. Suddenly everything changed. I knew there was an avenue for me in life. I quickly became obsessed. I didn’t have a car, but I did have a motorbike, so I’d put my drysuit, weight belt and tank on, strap my things to the back and drive to dive sites at night. Diving was my first true obsession, rather than photography. That sense of exploring beneath the waves was like nothing I’d experienced before.