Martin Gregus Jr. is an award winning photographer and videographer based in Vancouver. Brought up in Slovakia in a family of artists, Gregus has worked closely with his father, Martin Gregus Sr. from the age of 7. Since then, Gregus has travelled the world taking pictures of people, places, and animals with the mission to bring people closer to nature with his photographs.
I was first drawn to Gregus’s images because of the way they challenged my ideas about the Arctic landscape. Gregus’s series ‘33 Days Among the Bears’ gained much critical acclaim including publication in the iconic wildlife magazine, National Geographic. Unlike other archetypal images of polar bears I have seen, the bears in Gregus’s photographs are set against a bright Arctic summer, surrounded by the vibrant purple perennial, fireweed, clear blue seas and vivid greenery. While uncanny at times, I immediately felt there was a story to be told in these images that has not been historically represented in the mainstream media. In our conversation I wanted to understand how Gregus aims to dismantle commonly held ideas about belonging, climate, and human entanglements with animals.
Clearly, I am not the only person who has found Gregus’s images uncanny. During our conversation he talked at length about his frustration with people accusing him of using AI to produce his images. To me, this accusation is a modern response to a historic issue with the way the Arctic has been visually represented in Western media. The understanding of the landscape as a monolithic, featureless place neglects the complex ecosystems of Arctic summers that often remain underrepresented in visual culture. Consequently, when confronted with images that bring polar bears into this ‘new’ context – even though, as Gregus points out these assemblages have existed for millenia – we are quick to dismiss such photographs as manufactured or inauthentic.
The themes that emerged in our conversation speak to the logistical and rhetorical complexities of working in a landscape like the Arctic, which has captured the imagination of artists, writers, and explorers for centuries. What became clear was that alongside Gregus’s evident devotion to the Arctic wildlife, was a constant frustration at nature’s refusal to work to his carefully planned timetables for his expeditions and their hard-won funding. Such tensions bring a new light to the resulting photos which may look wonderfully serendipitous but in reality are the result of patience, perseverance, and the overcoming of numerous barriers to access.
There is an overarching need to use visual culture to enchant people and imbue them with care for nature. While Gregus dismissed ‘Disneyfied’ naming traditions and crass ventriloquism of animals, his large following on social media speaks to the power of finding common ground with other species to create a culture of mutual caring and empathy. Gregus’s enduring message – ‘I want people to fall in love with nature again’ – elicited in me some flickering hope for the future that we might as human beings find a way to see endangered species as collectives of individuals with distinct skillsets, personalities and impacts, rather than two-dimensional icons of irreversible anthropomorphic climate change, and that such a shift in viewpoint might move us from passive witness of the extinction crisis into community centered, grassroots organisation and movement.
Please Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Rae Ferner-Rose: You’ve taken photographs all over the world, but the Arctic does seem to have especially captured your imagination; can you tell me what first drew you to that landscape?
Martin Gregus: I started working in the Arctic in 2015. I was working on a project at the time that my dad and I created which was called 150 Canada, and the idea was to travel across Canada – all the territories and provinces – capturing people, cultures, wildlife, landscapes, essentially creating a multi-media package of Canada. So then I went to the Arctic and already I had these images in mind of, like, narwhals, and I’d never done a series before, or not really done a series before then, or spent much time with all these animals and in my mind. I was like ‘Ok well this is going to be hard to capture but you know, why not? We’re gonna go and see it.’
Then I came up [to Canada] and I was like ‘Oh man!’ This is just a cultural shock, the culture is different, the people are different, the land – everything is different. It was the first time I’d ever actually flown somewhere alone, because up until that point I was always travelling with my family somewhere, so my first flight anywhere was into the middle of nowhere in the Arctic. And I didn’t like it as much. I was like this is a little bit too much for me, I don’t know if I can continue coming up here. And then a few months later I came back again and then the next year I came back again and again and again and now I’ve done over 60 trips up there and I can’t really imagine spending time anywhere else. It kind of escalated from there.
RFR: I think you kind of started to touch on this already, but if you think back to the first trip you took, was there one thing that surprised you or challenged the preconceptions you had about going out [to the Arctic]?
MG: I kind of thought of the Arctic as Africa with snow. It’s Canada but it’s completely different to the rest of Canada – it’s a different culture, it’s a different kind of people, there’s so many differences there to anywhere else. It did intrigue me and it definitely sort of surprised me how different it was considering where it was. It was very different to the rest of Canada.
RFR: I think that’s very common: that kind of idea we have in our heads of this monolithic white place that has no features really apart from those charismatic animals we all know like polar bears.
MG: But there is beauty in the emptiness. I am not a huge fan of people or cities or anything like that so I did enjoy the loneliness and the landscape. And the idea that you were kayaking next to a huge iceberg and you could say – ‘I’m probably the only person in the world doing this right now.’ Where else can you say that? I drive down the street and I am one of a million people driving down the street somewhere, or a billion people driving down the street somewhere. You know? It still leaves a bit of space for imagination and exploration.
RFR: And since the first time you visited, you said you’ve been quite a few times now, how have you noticed that region changing, and how has that impacted the bears you photograph?
MG: I mean the changes and the unpredictability of it, these animals are used to seasons, they are used to a world that revolves around specific times. For a long time we had seasons, we had weather patterns that followed the weather patterns of the year before, you had snow melts come in and the snow melted within two weeks and the ice formed within one to two weeks. Now, we have a warm spell in January and a cold spell in August. People think of warming and the Arctic changing or climate change as the whole Arctic warming, and that’s not necessarily the case. It’s the unpredictability – and animals are used to things that are very predictable, like crops and flowers and plants, you know. How are they going to feel if in August they get minus one degrees celsius – everything is going to die. But that’s just becoming more and more of a reality.
It’s the same in the Arctic, the ice used to melt in a certain way. There are certain images that I would love to capture, but I will never see them because the ice just doesn’t melt that way any more or the weather patterns have changed. So, there’s a real unpredictability in that and I think a lot of people or a lot of polar bear conservation agencies or companies are hiding under the fact of – ‘we’ll stop climate change or we’ll stop this’ – but in fact it’s inevitable. But these animals are incredibly adaptive to their landscape. We just need to leave them alone, which I think people struggle with because we all have control issues, and we all wanna control something and feel like we’re helping something if we are controlling it, when we are actually doing the opposite.
RFR: Can I ask you to expand a little bit on when you said images you’d like to ideally capture. What kind of image is evoked in your mind when you say that?
MG: Yeah I would love images of polar bears – not just polar bears – but Narwhals in ice. Like iconic Nat Geo photos that came 2005-2010 where you had these hundreds of Narwhals in leagues and coming through the ice. I would love to have been there and used a drone and captured that and had an underwater camera, and I think in my mind I keep on putting myself in that situation visually of what I would have done. I think they are amazing pictures. I would love at least one shot at it.
But I know the ice just doesn’t melt that way any more. It’s also just incredibly expensive to get up there. So everything is kind of against you.
RFR: And I guess also you know the kind of photos that are going to start emerging will be unique in their own way because of the way the landscape is changing.
MG: Oh, for sure you know there’s different photos to be had, absolutely. And it’s just, it’s all different and that’s not to say that different is bad. It’s just in your mind you go with a certain list of pictures that you would like to capture and you are kind of hoping to capture, and like I said, it’s not the case any more.
RFR: What first drew me to your work was how different your photos were from the kind of archetypal polar bear images you see all the time of the bears in snow and ice. I know that when you went out to do your ‘33 Days Among the Bears’ project, it was an intentional choice you made to go in the summer during a period of seasonal ice-loss. Could you talk me through that decision making process?
MG: The whole idea behind the project my dad and I decided to do in 2013 was to capture all of these landscapes in periods that they maybe haven’t really been seen before so much. So, you know – go to the Arctic in the summertime or do a trip to New Brunswick or somewhere in Canada in the wintertime when maybe there’s not so many people so it’s a little uncommon. I saw pictures of bears in flowers made by another person in 2000 – sometime in the early 2000s – and I was like ok well bears in flowers I really want that. So, I approached a few people and a few companies, and I just realised that maybe this isn’t realistic. It’s an incredibly hard place to get to, but one company said ‘ok well you can still come up here in the summertime. You are not going to get bears in flowers but you know, bears in the summer. There’s still things that happen here, so you can try.’ So we ended up going up, and this was before the film ‘Seven Worlds’ or before the BBC filmed polar bears with beluga whales. And we saw polar bears and beluga whales, and it was really unique and really different, and I really wanted to continue.
I am incredibly driven in some things. When someone says no or when someone says ‘this can’t be done’ I just look for a way that it can be done and how to do it. So I ended up just pursuing it year after year and again. I put myself in the situation of – well when this person was capturing bears in flowers how did they do it, and how can I do it better? Eventually it paid off, and it took six years but I finally got myself up there, and the flowers didn’t bloom the first year I was up there which was incredibly frustrating because I had just put in six to seven years of work for something that didn’t happen. But we got amazing pictures of bears in the summer, and I ended up coming back and filming it again and again and again. So eventually it paid off.
RFR: And I think the virality of those images really speaks to your perseverance in getting them because they are really amazing. I can believe that there were images of that kind before but for me, it really shifted my ideas about where polar bears ‘belong.’ I think often when we see pictures of polar bears in periods of ice loss they are really emaciated and unhealthy and we’ve come to associate ice-less landscapes with polar bears who are very sick.
MG: I’m not saying that climate change isn’t real by any means, and I don’t want my pictures to take away from all the decades of work that people have put in to shift public perception of what is actually going on in the Arctic. But, at the same time, I know that there are a lot of NGOs and a lot of so-called ‘polar bear conservation groups’ that are using polar bears just to gain profit for themselves. They say ‘oh we will conserve polar bears and we will do this and we will do this.’ I work in the Arctic and you know I’ve never seen a polar bear that’s starving. I’ve seen bears that are skinny – but it fluctuates year to year.
Even today I saw a friend of mine posted a picture of a polar bear cub that was eaten by a male bear because scientists shot the mum to put a collar on her. The male bear turned up while she was still sleeping and took her cub. So, just in the last few years this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve heard of a bear dying because a scientist was trying to put a collar on it. Why aren’t we just leaving these animals? What benefit do we have? We know they have huge ranges, we know what they are hunting, we know they need sea ice, but how much more data do we need to prove where they go. We know where they go.
RFR: You’ve talked about the importance of seeing polar bears as individuals with personalities and character traits and that is something you really emphasise on your social media. Why do you think it’s so important to share these stories, not the story of a species, but the story of an individual or small group?
MG: We’re animals, people are animals, we used to live in nature. Our brains have changed in order for us to be sophisticated and live in cities and do all of these other things. But at the start we were animals, and now when we go into nature we get snippets of nature. We don’t see nature as wild animals but we see it like a zoo without a fence. We get a view when we interact with another animal or when we see an animal interacting with another animal or when we see an animal interacting with its landscape or sleeping or whatever. We see it for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day – we don’t see how that animal is interacting with its environment. And I think every animal has a personality and every animal has a role in its landscape. The role isn’t as broad as ‘bison are in the Prairies because they eat grass and they fertilise the soil’ and ‘polar bears are in the Arctic because they eat seals and they manage that population.’ Each individual has their own role in that environment. One individual might specialise in hunting terns, one might hunt seals and one of them is going to survive in the future because it hunted something and it learned something that the others didn’t – and the others will probably die. That one that survives will pass on that gene to the other bears and create potentially a new species or subspecies. I think what we are doing by hunting and managing and culling is stopping evolution, because we are essentially getting rid of the individuals that potentially carry genes that will persevere and change that species.
RFR: You had a particular intimacy with the group of bears that you lived with for over a month. Were you kind of aware when you were in and around their space of your role, in the bigger picture of what you are talking about. Obviously, you weren’t going out and shooting them, but were these thoughts going through your head while you were getting to know these bears?
MG: Oh, for sure. I mean you have an impact on them because you are living there, right? And you want your impact to be as little as possible but at the same time you want it to be known that just because they had a good experience with a person, doesn’t mean that they will have a good experience with every person. So you want your impact to be minimal but you also want it to be to some degree, you want to put them off a bit. You don’t want them to get used to people. When we dispose of garbage or anything like that, you always try and do it so that the animal doesn’t see you because even though it can smell something, you never want it to associate that with a human. So you do put in a lot of work and a lot of homework to make sure that your impact is as little as possible but at the same time not little enough that these animals will be coming to people for X, Y and Z. You know, you don’t want them to be habituated, essentially.
RFR: I think you definitely reap the benefits, visually, of spending that amount of time with these bears. I’m looking at a picture now of a mother feeding her cubs, and the kind of prolonged period you spent with them allowed you to capture that image as well. Could you speak a little bit about that experience?
MG: I think that when you do see those interactions like the mum nursing her cub, I really understand the impact I’m having here and that the work I’m doing is good because these animals are really not phased by my presence. They are here, they are here naturally, and they are just living their lives. When a mum is feeding her cubs she is incredibly vulnerable, it’s not something that she just does when she is put in a situation where she is going to endanger her cubs. She has to sit down, put her guard down – their adrenaline drops so they are in a completely different state. So when she does that in front of you and does it naturally, it’s huge because that animal is choosing to be in that landscape and is choosing to do that in front of you. So I think it has a huge impact.
You know I’ve baby-sat polar bears where I’ve had, you know, a mum come by and they fell asleep by our camp or close to our camp and when the babies woke up she decided, ‘ok well I’m going to leave’ and you are left in this situation of ‘are you coming back?’ And these cubs are running around and playing and hanging out next to your camp and then an hour or two later she comes back and picks them up and you’re like – Ok what just happened? What did I just witness? A lot of the time you see so many of these prejudices, or maybe prejudice is not the right word, but our visual way of thinking about these animals.
Slovakia is doing a great job right now of villainizing these bears. There is a word in Slovakian and it’s, like, worse than predator, it’s meant to invoke fear and they use that for bears. It’s the same way that we’ve always said, ‘mums and cubs are the absolute worst because the mum will do everything to defend their cubs.’ Yeah – mums and cubs are the worst if you are doing something to actively hurt the cub, or if you are trying to get between her and the cub. I found mums and cubs to be the absolute best to work with because you always know where you are. The mum is going to do everything to protect her cub. And you know maybe polar bears are just a lot more intelligent than other bears or other animals but at the same time I always know where I am with bears. I always know where the line is. Sometimes the line shifts and you just shift with it, but I always know where I am.
I fear bears less than I fear people, because with people you never know – people are fake and people are cunning, there’s so many other emotions that people have and you never know what a person is like. Why is that person at the bar coming to me? Do they wanna get to know me? Do they want to hang out? Do they want to steal my wallet? You know, do they want to hurt me? What do they want to do? With bears it’s very simple, are they here to come and eat me or are they here to investigate.
RFR: I think even without reading any of your captions or looking at any of the titles of your work, just looking through your work, you get this kinship and fondness. I kind of get the sense that you like bears more than you like people (both laugh). Or at least you like the company of bears more than you like the company of people.
MG: I’ve spent more time with bears than I have with most people.
RFR: Your work has been published in some of the most prestigious publications in the world like National Geographic, and you share your work quite a lot on social media. I’m curious – is there one comment you get about your work more than any other?
MG: I mean, people assume my work is AI all the time. But people assumed that before AI was even AI. The [bear photographs] came out right at the start of it, or even before it. You know I had producers, I won’t name them, but big producers from Hollywood, say ‘I work in this industry , and I can tell when AI is AI, and this is AI, because the flowers are moving this way when they should be moving this way’ and I’m thinking – well you should look for a new job (laughs). It’s just not the reality of it, but people can’t really put their finger on it, you know they see bears in flowers and they think, you know, it’s AI, because they don’t understand the landscape. I think as AI becomes more prominent or as it does become harder for us to realise what is what and is what we’re seeing real or is it fake. At the end of the day it comes down to what is that behaviour. Even if the image looks very real, the behaviour may not, and that’s when you start to associate reality with something being fake.
RFR: I think that kind of comment – that your work is AI – is a modern response to a historic issue, that the way we’ve come to know polar bears visually is so one note. Our visual culture informs the way we think about species so much that when we see anything that diverts from that is immediately uncanny, and AI has amplified that and will probably continue to do so. But I think that it’s more important than ever to have these authentic images that put into question our entrenched ideas about places and landscapes.
MG: And you know, people just aren’t very bright. You know sometimes I was caught off guard by something, and I thought it is scary how good this is but you are taking a human experience out of something that needs the human experience in it. You are also showing people, because in the past these pictures were captured by people, you had that level of intelligence in the picture because you are just not going to go and take that picture because it’s too close or I’m not going to put myself in danger to hold this animal. I’m not going to pet this bear. I see this animal dying, but I am not going to go and feed it because ultimately that’s just going to put more people and animals in danger. So you’ve removed that now and you have all these [AI] videos of ‘people’ petting bears and ‘people’ swimming with animals they shouldn’t be swimming with and doing these dangerous things. You know you put two and two together and think well – how long before someone tries to do this in the real world because they saw something on their computer that says this is OK? So they are going to try and re-enact it – they are going to try and actually pet a bear, and they will get injured or they will die. And sure, they will die but then the animal dies as well which is where that’s a problem.
RFR: Yeah, and what you were just talking about, bears are having to adapt and their behaviours are changing. I was just reading a paper earlier about bears in Svalbard whose diets were changing towards terrestrial, land-based prey like small mammals –
MG: – and reindeer. This is where you will lose species because you will lose certain individuals and sub populations because they can’t adapt or they haven’t learned to hunt X,Y and Z. Yeah, you will lose certain bears, or other animals, it doesn’t just have to be tied to bears. But this is why I think that, of all times in history, this is the time when you need to stop, say like trophy hunting and recreational hunting. Because we are at such a precipice, I think, in the evolution of these animals where they are adapting to a changing world and they have to adapt so quickly because their world is changing so quickly. If we add the additional question of us hunting them or culling them or doing all of these things, we are removing individuals that will carry on these genes that will potentially save them.
And we are seeing this in Svalbard, and some of these bears died because of scientists, but we removed some of these bears that were hunting reindeer. What if, in one hundred years, the reindeer-hunting bears are the only bears left in Svalbard? And now we’ve just slowed down their evolution process because the four bears that knew how to do it – we killed three of them – whether intentionally or not. This is the time when nature needs to be left alone.
RFR: How do you see the scope of your work changing due to climate change, but also due to all of the things that we’ve been talking about, behavioural changes and adaptations? How do you picture that changing visually?
MG: I mean it’s changing in the sense that content is harder to get. Especially because you need much bigger budgets to be able to spend so much time in these locations, or you need to be able to look for new ways to capture [things]. It opens the door to capturing unique content and footage that people haven’t seen before because. You know, bears in flowers isn’t the only unique thing that happens in the Arctic – it’s unique because no one has seen it, but that doesn’t mean it’s never happened before, it has been happening for hundreds of years, but no one has gone there to really capture it. So as the world becomes more accessible these stories become ever-more present. But, yeah it’s just a lot harder because you need bigger budgets, you need more time to be able to spend in these areas and you need to come back potentially year after year after year because the environment is changing, the wildlife is changing, there are so many other variables that didn’t used to be there.
In the past you used to be able to tell somebody and say ‘go to this forest on Sunday at 6 o’clock and there’s going to be a deer eating flowers in that corner of the field’ and now you have so many other variables of ok well, are the flowers even in bloom because there was a summer frost, or is that deer even there because there’s so many more people that it might have just not survived, you know there’s so many variables that you have to consider that you might not have before.
RFR: In the coming years, as things change rapidly, what do you hope your work can give people, in terms of an overall message?
MG: I want people to kind of fall in love with nature again. I feel like we’ve lost that. I feel like with the pictures I share on social media or with the stories I try and capture, I try to personify animals. I used to name them, but now I don’t do that so much. I think it has almost been overdone. When you start naming a squirrel or a raven or a fish and then it gets aired on a big broadcasting platform, I find it just kind of silly. We did it to personify the animals but now we’re just trying to personify them more through their antics and the things that they do. So just trying to push that narrative in the storytelling – these are animals. This isn’t a polar bear, this isn’t a beluga whale, this isn’t a narwhal – this is an individual that has meaning in its own right and in its landscape.
Rae Ferner-Rose