Photographing Polar Bears in Churchill with Johnny Hayward
'Learn to Look'
My interest in photography started long before we began our Polar project.
My father gave me my first real experience with a DSLR when I was eigh years old, and some of my earliest lessons happened in the Swiss Alps, photographing the glaciers. I remember being fascinated by the fact that a camera could make you look at a landscape differently. You started noticing light, texture, distance and small details that you might otherwise simply walk past.
That fascination never really went away. Photography became a hobby that has followed me ever since, alongside my life as a musician. At one point it even became part of my work, when I made a documentary about the Spanish composer and violinist Pablo de Sarasate. Much of that project, like so many of my photographs over the years, was created with my trusty Pentax DSLR.
So when we began developing the Polar Knowledge project at DeSalvio Travel and Sarasota Cruise Agency, I was naturally drawn to the photographers who spend their lives looking closely at the Arctic. They see things that a first-time visitor may not notice, and they have learned that getting a photograph is often less important than understanding what is happening in front of you.
That is what made this conversation with Johnny particularly interesting to me. He has spent many years photographing polar bears around Churchill, Manitoba, first as a photojournalist and now as a photographer and guide. His photographs are obviously part of what he does, but his real expertise comes from watching these animals season after season and learning their behaviour.
One idea from our conversation stayed with me: sensory loading. Johnny encourages people to pause before raising the camera and actually experience the moment. Feel the cold, listen to the wind, notice the smell of the sea, hear the snow beneath your boots and take in the landscape.
As someone who has spent years looking through a camera myself, I found that advice particularly compelling. We travel with cameras because we want to remember what we saw. Johnny's point is that sometimes the best way to make a photograph meaningful is to experience everything around it first.
Here is our conversation about polar bears, photography, patience and learning to look.
What has photographing polar bears taught you about them that visitors might not understand from a short encounter?
I think one of the biggest things polar bears have taught me is just how important patience and resilience are to their survival.
They are incredibly patient animals. On the sea ice, a bear may wait for hours at a seal’s breathing hole for an opportunity that may or may not come. On land around Churchill, they can spend months waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze again so they can return to the ice and hunt.
They are also remarkably resilient. Polar bears can swim extraordinary distances and endure conditions that are difficult for us to imagine. We are also seeing them take advantage of different food sources while on land, including geese, birds and eggs. These foods cannot replace the energy they obtain from seals, but watching these behaviours gives you a sense of how adaptable and resourceful these animals can be.
A short encounter can leave you with an impression of a very large, powerful animal.
Spending years watching them gives you a much deeper appreciation for their patience, intelligence and ability to survive in an incredibly demanding environment.
How does patience change the way you experience and photograph polar bears?
If you want to understand a polar bear—and make meaningful photographs of one—you have to be willing to put in the time.
It isn’t about finding a bear and hoping it immediately gets up and does something interesting. These are wild animals. They aren’t there to perform for us.
Sometimes a bear sleeps for hours. But if you are patient, that same encounter might eventually turn into two bears sparring, a mother interacting tenderly with her cubs, a bear testing the ice or simply a beautiful moment when the animal becomes completely comfortable with its surroundings.
In some ways, to photograph a polar bear well, you have to learn to be a little bit like the bear itself: patient.
What do visitors most commonly misunderstand when they first encounter polar bears in Churchill?
One thing I sometimes see, particularly with people who have experience photographing grizzly or black bears farther south, is an assumption that those experiences translate directly to polar bears.
They don’t.
People may have photographed grizzlies along a salmon river where food is abundant and bears are accustomed to concentrating in an area. That can sometimes give people a level of comfort around bears that isn’t appropriate with a polar bear.
Polar bears are magnificent animals, but they are also extremely powerful carnivores and predators built to hunt. They deserve an enormous amount of respect.
I think understanding that distinction is very important. You can have an extraordinary encounter without needing to push closer. Respecting the animal and maintaining appropriate distances doesn’t diminish the experience—it makes it better.
How do you balance getting a compelling photograph with allowing the animals to behave naturally?
A lot of it comes down to watching behaviour and trying to anticipate where an animal is going rather than reacting to every movement it makes.
In my experience, polar bears can often be quite directional. If I see a bear walking toward a particular bay, for example, rather than continually following it down the road, I may drive well ahead to the other side and wait.
Nine times out of ten, unless the bear decides to lie down or change direction, it will eventually continue toward us.
That allows the bear to make the decisions.
We haven’t blocked its travel route, continually repositioned around it or forced it to react to us. We put ourselves somewhere appropriate and wait to see what happens.
Again, it comes back to patience. Some of my favourite photographs have happened because we anticipated an animal’s movement, gave it space and then simply waited.
Has years of photographing polar bears changed the way you see Churchill and its landscape?
Yes and no.
The funny thing is that the more time I spend in Churchill, the more I realize there is still something new to see.
Every year the landscape seems to show me something I haven’t noticed before. The weather is constantly changing, the light changes incredibly quickly, the ice changes, the animals move differently and no two days ever seem exactly alike.
You can’t wake up in Churchill and confidently say, “This is what is going to happen today.”
That unpredictability is part of what keeps bringing me back. It is a wild, untamed, natural and very raw landscape, and even after all these years it can still completely surprise me.
What would you like a traveler to understand before raising a camera during their first polar-bear encounter?
One thing I talk about with my guests—and something I’ve written about—is what I call sensory loading.
When that first polar bear appears, the natural instinct for a photographer is to immediately put the camera to their eye and start taking pictures. I encourage people, at least for a moment, to do the opposite.
Before you raise the camera, take a few seconds and load your senses.
Listen to the wind. Feel the cold air against your skin. Maybe there are snowflakes hitting your face and collecting on your eyelashes. Notice if there is a particular smell in the air—perhaps even the smell of salt coming off Hudson Bay. Listen to the snow beneath your boots and take in the quiet and the enormous landscape surrounding you.
Use every sense you have, not just your eyes.
For me, sensory loading adds another layer to the photograph. You’re creating more than a visual memory. You’re connecting that image to how the moment actually felt.
Months or years later, when you’re sitting at home editing your photographs, those sensations can come rushing back. You look at an image and remember, Oh yeah, I remember how cold the wind felt against my face that day. Or, I remember the smell of salt in the air. Maybe you remember the snowflakes hitting your eyelashes or just how incredibly quiet everything was.
Suddenly that photograph isn’t simply a picture of a polar bear. It becomes a doorway back into the entire experience.
I’ve spent much of my life as a professional photographer, so photographs are obviously enormously important to me. But I never want a photograph to become someone’s only memory of Churchill.
So before that first polar bear encounter—and throughout the trip—every once in a while, lower the camera. Listen. Feel. Smell. Look around.
Take the photograph, absolutely. But take a moment to experience everything surrounding that photograph as well.
Years from now, those little sensory details may be what brings the photograph—and the entire experience—back to life.
More information about Johnny and Bear Witness can be found here:
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