A Lifetime of Being Astonished and Telling About It

With a spirit that closely models poet Mary Oliver’s “instructions for living a life” from her poem “Sometimes,” Canadian photographer and conservationist Paul Nicklen has spent his life documenting and advocating for wildlife in remote and often endangered habitats around the globe. If you’ve thumbed through a National Geographic magazine over the last two decades, chances are you’ve seen his work as an assignment photographer. A marine biologist with a specialty in polar ecosystems, Nicklen is particularly renowned for his evocative, poignant portraits of whales, polar bears, walruses, and other Arctic animals in environments that are extreme for humans to be in, let alone a photographer trying to juggle gear, often underwater. In 2006, he shared photos and a story from Antarctica of how a female leopard seal, with a head larger than a grizzly bear’s, had first put her mouth around his head as well as his camera, then went on to try to feed him penguins—first live ones, then dead—which she’d drop near him as he scuba dived near her for days. That story has gone viral on social media in recent years, testimony to how Nicklen’s close encounters with wild animals strike a raw, emotional chord for people all over the world.