CAMILLE SEAMAN

Camille Seaman describes herself as a bi-polar photographer, but she’s referring to her passion for shooting the frozen ends of the earth. Keith Wilson discovers that the distances she’s travelled apply as much to her personal journey as they do to her travels

01 ICEBERGS REFLECTED AT SUNRISE ON THE SOLSTICE, WEDDELL SEA III

From Camille’s most recent series, A Matter of Time. Shot in Antarctica

Lens Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

Exposure 1/40 sec, f/6.3, ISO500

ALTHOUGH one of the world’s most renowned photographers of the Arctic and Antarctica, Camille Seaman may never have ventured to the earth’s vast polar regions if she hadn’t decided back in 1999 to give up her seat on a flight. It’s commonplace in America for domestic flights to be oversold, and passengers are enticed to give up their seats in exchange for a free return flight at a future date. In Camille’s case, she was offered “a free round-trip ticket to anywhere the airline flew.” She had recently moved from New York to California to escape the harsh east coast winters and, as she puts it, “Had no desire, ambition, or interest at all to go to any place cold.” But all that changed. Camille’s free ticket was with Alaska Airlines and her curiosity got the better of her – she decided to fly to the Arctic outpost of Kotzebue on the frozen shores of the Bering Strait, which separates Alaska and Siberia. Walking on the sea ice in this alien environment had a transformational impact upon her. Although she didn’t know at the time, Camille was a few weeks pregnant: “My journey as a mother began as I walked on that ice.” A few years later she would return to the Arctic, this time to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, but it was on her first trip to Antarctica in 2004 that she was “truly blown away in every sense of the word…”