By Susan Lukowski
It was late afternoon in the storm-tossed Scotia Sea just off the frozen coast of Antarctica’s South Georgia Island. A small group took off in a Zodiac to explore the waters near their expedition’s supply ship when a striking iceberg caught their attention. Carmel photographer Robert Knight was on board. One of the iceberg photographs he took earned one of the world’s most coveted photo awards for 2007, top honors in the Wild Places category of BBC Wildlife Magazine and the British Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
“I had heard that South Georgia Island was the ‘Serengeti of the South,’ with abundant wildlife and spectacular landscapes,” says Knight, a self-taught photographer and Carmel gallery owner who has made expeditions to all seven continents.
“Our group spent 10 days on the island,” 1,000 miles from South America’s Cape Horn, Knight recounts, “arriving by ship from the Falklands, itself a four-day journey.” He was there to photograph king penguins, finding that in one location alone there were some 120,000 of the island’s 700,000 population, set against what Knight describes as “a primordial place” of magnificent ice-covered mountains.
Last Saturday, fascinated guests moved through the private party at the Robert Knight Gallery to admire his compelling 2006 photograph, entitled “Stormy Ice Sculpture.” This year the annual competition received more than 32,000 entries submitted from 78 countries and the judging took three months. It was the first photography competition Knight has ever entered.
Knight’s passion to document his visual experiences has drawn him into grueling and sometimes dangerous situations. An experienced paraglider pilot, he nearly died this summer while paragliding in a thermal updraft near Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta. “My camera was attached to my chest when I saw an eagle enter the draft above me,” he says. “I worked with my gear to take photos, not paying complete attention to piloting the glider. Suddenly I experienced turbulence and there was a partial collapse of a wing.”
On a recent one-month trek along the John Muir Trail, another tricky situation developed when a snowstorm hit four days before the trip’s scheduled end. His group left with the packhorses while Knight continued. He calls the 60-mile, four-day expedition with a 55-pound pack in often-deep snow, without skis or snowshoes, “the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
After a day alone, two stragglers from his group caught up with him. On their last night they climbed Mt. Whitney in full moonlight and watched the sun rise from its 14,500-foot summit, before completing the 22-hour journey back.
A former restaurateur and scuba dive master, Knight knows there are easier ways to earn a living, but he clearly loves his lifestyle. His longest trip was a 14-month journey around the United States, mostly along the Continental Divide.
Understanding that other travelers may not want to put in the kind of hours he does, he moves around the world solo, saying “I prefer to travel alone when I’m working.”
“I’m out before dawn and back after sunset,” he says. “[But] nature itself is one of the greatest teachers… there are times when you are gifted a precious moment, and you know you are experiencing something special, then I work to document that same feeling.”
Knight describes himself as a self-taught photographer who never apprenticed. He set his course on a career in fine art photography and says, “there was no big break, it was a slow build.” Knight works mostly with a variety of large-format film cameras, although he has begun using digital for “fast-moving, handheld situations.”
“Stormy Ice Sculpture” was taken with a digital camera. Knight notes that digital technology enables shots with tremendous clarity of both the background and moving subjects in the foreground.
“[I took it at] F-13 at 1/800 second,” he says. “This is unachievable with film.”
Africa, where Knight has made seven trips, is one of his preferred locations, and it’s there that he has recorded some of his most memorable subjects. Animals know human behavior in their own environment, they’ve come to know what to expect of people, he says: “They become poker-faced and lose their real movements and expressions.” But after a few days of living in the Kenyan bush, with only a Masai guide, one of the male lions came to remember his scent and to trust Knight, sensing that he wasn’t there to hunt or compete for his pride. In the moment the sun come over the horizon and lit the animal’s eyes and mane, Knight snapped one of his most intimate portraits of nature from a distance of 15 feet. “You can see the sunrise reflected in his eyes,” Knight says.
Originally from Chappaqua, N.Y., by way of Boulder, Colo., Knight moved to Carmel in 1995 because of its “beauty, accessibility to the outdoors and tradition of fine-art photography.” He is married to Lyndie, a children’s speech pathologist.
He has written and published two books, American Landscapes and Seascapes, and is anticipating the release next year of a book project he has been working on for 10 years. He plans to return to Antarctica next year, and will be in China as well, to photograph Siberian tigers and pandas.