I flipped through a book on harp seals in the late 1970s and saw images of them swimming in emerald green pools of water surrounded by huge sheets of ice. Right then I was hooked and I knew this was a story I wanted to do. The world of these harp seals, which is always shifting with a change in the tide or the wind, was something that seemed very magical to me.
More than two decades and a hefty story proposal later, I found myself showing up on the Magdalen Islands in Canada for National Geographic. It was my first day on the job and I felt really great. The scenery was incredibly beautiful and serene and I could already hear the seal pups yowling in the distance. I'd finally made it.
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During my first season of shooting we didn't run into any problems with the ice floes. So I got almost 17 days on a fishing boat and had great access to the harp seals. Unfortunately, I didn't have the same luck the following year. On our sixth day out, the captain of the boat summoned me up from my cabin at 2 a.m. A blizzard was raging, ice was pushing against all sides of the boat, threatening to crush it, and some 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) slabs of ice were crashing into each other and flying through the air.
The first question the captain asked me was if I had my survival gear, which I did, and the second was if my camera equipment was insured because we were going to have to leave it. That made my heart drop because someone had stolen $50,000 worth of my camera equipment on a different assignment in Venezuela six months earlier. I had to re-purchase almost everything and I had it all with me on the boat, packed into 20 different cases. All I could think was, This is going to be bad.
Four hours later an ice breaker pushed through to our stranded boat and rescued us—and my camera gear—but I sure did get a scare.
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I was the first journalist allowed on a hunting boat during harp seal season in almost 15 years. Around the late 1970s whitecoat pups became the poster child for the anti-fur movement and by the '80s the media was lambasting the hunters for killing them. Business sharply dropped and this tight-knit community of hunters reacted by vowing to never let another journalist on their boat during the spring hunt.
Well, I ended up befriending one of these hunters and I eventually asked him if I could come with him during the hunt. He said yes, even though he had absolutely nothing to gain from it. This was a harsh transition for me. Just two weeks earlier I'd been photographing cute pups with their mothers. And now that these pups were old enough to be legally hunted, I was seeing their dead, bloody bodies all over the boat.
I tried to work discretely because I didn't know how my friend's crew would feel about my presence, but they didn't seem to care and were very welcoming. I still can't say I'm completely comfortable with hunting, but after being with these men I learned that they're not evil barbarians. It's legal and for them it's a livelihood in a region that offers little financial opportunities outside fishing.
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