Subhankar Banerjee

The book she was holding was Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, which includes 200 photos by 1994 NMSU graduate Subhankar Banerjee as well as essays by leading conservationists and a foreword by former President Jimmy Carter.

Although others have captured images of the 19.5 million-acre refuge during its brief summer season, Banerjee was the first to document it in all four seasons. The photographs he brought back shattered assumptions that the refuge was frozen, barren and lifeless during most of the year. His photographs have been published by newspapers and magazines around the world, including Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Outside, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Audubon, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Boxer’s public promotion of this book propelled the soft-spoken Banerjee into the national spotlight – and secured him in a new career as a photographer and environmental advocate.

At the time of Boxer’s public display of his book, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was putting the final touches on an exhibit of Banerjee’s photographs that had been in the works for more than a year. The exhibition was moved from the main rotunda to the basement without explanation, and the scientific captions were removed. News of the changes prompted a nationwide flurry of charges about political interference.

Although his original exhibition never appeared at the Smithsonian, media attention generated by the controversy made other major institutions take notice of Banerjee’s work and agree to display it. The California Academy of Sciences took a leadership role in recreating the original exhibit and the Santa Fe-based Lannan Foundation funded a seven-state tour of the exhibit that is running through 2007.

The Lannan Foundation also awarded Banerjee a Cultural Freedom Fellowship to share his experiences with audiences across the country. Banerjee returned to NMSU in April as part of a lecture tour to more than 20 states.

Introduction to Nature

The rare buff-breasted sandpiper migrates to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from Argentina each year.

On his recent visit to NMSU, Banerjee talked about his unusual odyssey from computer science student to nature photographer.

A native of India, Banerjee came to NMSU in 1990 to earn master’s degrees in physics and computer science. Shortly after his arrival, he was joined by his childhood best friend from Calcutta, Kaustuve Bhattacharyya, who had done long hikes in the Himalayas as a teenager. Bhattacharyya, who earned his master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1993, took Banerjee on a backpacking trip to the Gila Wilderness in 1991. Banerjee says the experience changed his life forever.

“I fell in love with nature,” he says. Banerjee joined the Sierra Club at NMSU and went on to become its outings chair, leading hikes throughout New Mexico and Arizona. Meanwhile, Banerjee took several art and photography classes at NMSU. He didn’t finish any of them, but he kept doing photography as a hobby. After earning his degrees in 1994, Banerjee worked as a computational scientist for two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory and then for four years at the Boeing Corp. in Seattle.

While working in Seattle, Banerjee found two good amateur photography clubs to join, one at Boeing and one with the Mountaineers, a large outdoor organization headquartered in the city.

In early 2000, Banerjee left Boeing and began traveling around looking for a photographic project. He took a trip to Churchill in Manitoba, Canada, to photograph polar bears but was disappointed because as soon as he saw a bear, many large vehicles would converge on it.

“I decided I wanted to be in a place untrammeled by tourism or industry where I could live among these bears,” he says.

Intrigued by the Arctic

This photo that Subhankar Banerjee took of an Inupiat cemetery in Kaktovik has appeared in publications across the world.

In his search to find a place to live with polar bears in the wild, Bannerjee began corresponding with biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who had worked in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“The Arctic intrigued me because I had grown up in the tropics,” Banerjee says.

After reading a 1986 Fish and Wildlife Service report about wildlife in the Arctic, Banerjee was stunned by how much biodiversity there was in the refuge and how little had been photographed. He found the project he was looking for.

Fish and Wildlife Service employees hooked Banerjee up with Robert Thompson, an Inupiat guide who they said could provide him with the gear he would need to live in northern Alaska. Thompson also provided an entrée to the native people, who Banerjee also wanted to study as part of his project.

After five months of preparation, Banerjee and Thompson began their expedition on March 19, 2001, in Thompson’s native village of Kaktovik on the north side of the refuge.

“It was minus 40 degrees that day and that night it dropped to minus 90 degrees,” Banerjee recalled as he gave a slide show to an audience in Corbett Center Auditorium. “My cameras froze, and I started thinking ‘what am I doing here?’”

But Thompson assured him he would survive, and he did. The pair spent 14 months traveling through 4,000 miles of the refuge on foot, raft, kayak and snowmobile. They stayed out for a week or two at a time, then went back to native villages to resupply and bathe.

Banerjee’s patience frequently paid off, as he captured photos of landscapes, animals and native peoples that no one else had ever photographed. He even captured an uncommon show of red Northern Lights.

In the spring of 2002, Banerjee and Thompson camped out in a tent for 29 days trying to photograph a mother polar bear and her cubs. During the month-long excursion there were only four calm days. The rest of the time, the wind gusted to 60 miles an hour and the temperature, with wind chill, bottomed out at minus 100. They never saw the bears again after the first day.

“That one day of viewing the bear and her cubs play on the snowbank of the Canning River delta made all those blizzardly days seem worthwhile,” Banerjee says.

That summer, Banerjee and Thompson flew to the refuge’s coastal plain to spend a week watching the annual migration of the Porcupine caribou, which has given the refuge its nickname of “America’s Serengeti.” Each year pregnant caribou migrate to the coastal plain to give birth. The Gwich’in Athabascan Indian natives, who have lived on the south side of the refuge for more than 10,000 years, depend on these caribou for their survival. Drilling in the coastal plain could change the route of the caribou’s annual migration.

Banerjee also photographed a variety of birds that migrate to the coastal plain in the summer to take advantage of the long days and abundant insects to feed their young. He tells a poignant story of watching two Pacific loons taking turns attending to a nest, only to learn later that an Arctic fox raided the nest and ate the eggs.

Banerjee returned to the lower 48 states occasionally during his 14-month expedition to show his photos and find a publisher for his book. It was eventually published by The Mountaineers Books.

Return from the Wild

Subhankar Banerjee spent 29 days in a tent trying to capture photos of this polar bear mother and her cubs frolicking by their den.

After his final return from Alaska, Banerjee says he had a lot of trouble readjusting to society. He was so depressed he couldn’t take pictures for a year. But new projects and the ongoing fight to protect the refuge finally helped rejuvenate him. (At the time the refuge was created, 1.5 million acres on the coastal plain were left open for Congress to decide whether to drill or keep open. Although Banerjee was originally unaware of the controversy surrounding the refuge, his time there has made Banerjee a vocal opponent of drilling in the refuge.)

After he completes his speaking tour on Alaska at the end of this year, Banerjee’s fellowship from the Lannan Foundation will enable him to spend five years photographing and studying in India. He plans to live and work with dispossessed communities to document issues such as food, water, literacy and public health. The United Nations will be a partner on this project.

He also is planning to work on a film documenting the migration of birds to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Banerjee says he hopes others, especially students, will learn something from his story.

“If you follow your dream and work hard at it, amazing things will happen,” he says. “When I went to NMSU, who would have thought I would become an internationally known photographer?”

For more information on Subhankar Banerjee’s book and traveling photo exhibit, visit www.wwbphoto.com

Read excerpts from Subhankar Banerjee's book »