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.

In 1996, he moved to Seattle, with a job at Boeing. He also joined the Boeing photography club where one of his images—a silhouetted black-tailed deer against a mountain and a lake—was voted “Slide of the Year”. “I thought, maybe I could be really good at this. It gave me confidence and I began to seriously contemplate a career in photography,” he says.  

... contd.