AN INDIAN AT THE NORTH POLE

Banerjee doesn’t mind it much that his photographs have been used without credit by many agencies. “I am happy that my photo has become authorless. That’s why it has done what I could have not done for it,” he says.  His nonchalance perhaps derives from the fact that he wasn’t a professional shutterbug to begin with. Neither did he think he would ever become one. “In my life, there are no straight lines. The route by which I arrived in Alaska was as spontaneous as my wanderings across the Arctic tundra,” he says.
Born in Behrampur, West Bengal, to a banker father and an accountant mother, Banerjee studied electrical engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. In 1990, he moved to the US for further studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He then landed a job as a researcher and, about the same time, joined the Sierra Club, an environmental NGO. He had “no idea about ecology”; he just wanted some adventure. So he went out on skiing, trekking and kayaking trips across the wilderness in southern America, clicking away with a large Minolta 35 mm camera.

Banerjee quit Boeing in early 2000 and started from scratch. He travelled across sanctuaries in North America to study wildlife. He got the first taste of the Arctic when he went to Churchill in Canada. In 2001, he decided to visit Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a land with incredible diversity of life but very limited visual documentation. The 19.8 million-acre refuge has 36 species each of animal and fish and over 180 species of birds that converge there from all over the world. It is also the most contested public land in American history. For over 30 years now, the Congress has been debating about whether to open it to oil and gas development or preserve it. “There’ve been umpteen media stories and botanical studies done on the ANWR and yet I realized the few photographs of the land were shot only during summer,” he says. Banerjee smelt opportunity and decided to photograph the place all year round.
He embarked on his trip, spending every penny he had saved till then—$80,000—and borrowed $60,000 from friends and institutions. He landed there on March 19, 2001. The temperature was -90 F, the season’s coldest day and a blizzard was on. “My camera froze instantly. I panicked. What the hell am I, a man from Kolkata, doing here? This is way beyond me. But Robert Thompson, my Inupiat guide, reassured me and I trusted him. And then, it was one baby-step at a time,” he says. The blizzard lasted 25 days and in such harshness, Banerjee saw a mother polar bear and her cubs walking out of the den. “That was an epiphany. I thought that if such harshness could support life, I better record it,” he says. For 14 months, Banerjee, armed with a 35 mm Nikon camera, travelled 3,000 miles on foot and by snowmobile, feeding on moose, caribou and whale meat and nearly losing his toes to frostbite.
His grit paid off. Photographs of his first Arctic expedition were published in the book Seasons of Life and Land with the foreword written by former US president Jimmy Carter. On March 19, 2003, senator Boxer showed his photographs in a debate over oil drilling in the Arctic and urged her colleagues to visit an exhibition of his photographs at the government-funded Smithsonian museum. The museum got cold feet and Banerjee’s photos were removed from the primary hall. But the controversy catapulted him to fame.
Though Banerjee basked in this unexpected fame, he was also scared. “First, I was under a $100,000 debt. My project’s expenses had gone through the roof. And then there were powerful senators such as Ted Stevens who publicly called me a liar. I was an outsider speaking on contentious issues and the post-9/11 xenophobic backlash hadn’t yet faded,” he says.  

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