The Current - The Canadian photo that won Wildlife Photo of the Year

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Canadian Shane Gross has just won the Wildlife Photo of the Year award, for a picture that might change how you think about tadpoles. He tells us about the time he spends underwater and what he wants people on dry land to know about the world below the surface.

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Ultimately, we agreed that tonight's winning image brought together all that we were hoping for for the 60th anniversary. A conservation narrative, a powerful moment, a strong aesthetic, as well as an often overlooked environment. So please join me in congratulating and welcoming to the stage our 60th Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024. All the way from Canada, Shane Gross for The Swarm of Life.

And with that, all the way from Canada, British Columbia, Shane Gross became the newest member of a very elite group of wildlife photographers. Shane Gross, good morning. Good morning. Congratulations. Thank you so much. What was it like? You're in the audience they say this announce your name what was your reaction i complete disbelief i mean and and hearing

hearing that come back i got chills and i got emotional oh what a it was an amazing moment. I really couldn't believe it. I was so not expecting to win the overall prize. So I was so relaxed, thinking, oh, this will be a nice moment for whoever wins. And I had my cell phone pointed at the stage to record whoever it was, their reaction and their speech. And then it dawned on me that it was me. And I was just like, no way. It was, it was amazing. You've entered this contest. I mean, for years and years and years. Yeah. I, the first time I entered was back in 2011. So I'm looking at the image that one described the swarm of life. It's astonishing, but tell me what I'm looking at. Well, thank you so much. Um, so this is, um, a school of tadpoles, which fun fact,

they can also be called an army of tadpoles. Um, they are marching from, uh, the deep end of the lake and they make a migration every day to the shallow part of the lake to feed on algae. And algae is growing on the lily pad stems. So you're seeing a background of multicolored, brightly colored, beautifully lit lily pads with hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny tadpoles in the foreground. The tadpoles are, you know, people think they're just a dull black or gray, but these ones are flecked with gold. They're actually quite beautiful little tadpoles. So I hope that kind of paints a picture for listeners. I mean, they are beautiful. I've been trying to sell this and saying you're coming up on the program. And I said, we're talking about tadpoles. And you can kind of imagine people going, oh,

you're coming up on the program. And I said, we're talking about tadpoles. And you can kind of imagine people going, oh yeah, right, tadpoles, sure. There's something, what's different about what you have captured than what might be in people's mind of what a tadpole looks like? Well, I hope it's a bit more detail,

but it's also placing them in their environment. So, you know, how I did that was i used a an extreme wide angle lens a fisheye lens so i could get very very close to the tadpoles um so they're larger in the frame and then i lit them from the front with strobes so that you can you can really see all that detail um but it also places them in their environment and and this lake on vancouver island is absolutely beautiful even if there weren't tadpoles there it would be beautiful it's relatively clear water and like i said multi-colored um lily pads stretching from the from the bottom to the top so you have these vertical lines and then the you know the formation of the the tadpoles wriggling along. Um, I'm, I'm

so thrilled how people are responding to the image. You said in some ways that this image is a story of hope. Tell me about the story that you wanted to tell with this photograph. Well, um, amphibians, especially toads and frogs, are under threat all over the world from myriad sources. There's the chytrid fungus, which these tadpoles are extremely vulnerable to. There's, of course, climate change. There's habitat destruction. There's all these ways that they're being impacted. But when you go in this lake, you are reminded that there are still places that are still pristine, that are completely untouched by the hand of man.

And, you know, we need to remind ourselves that there is still a lot of beauty out there. And it needs our protection, but it can give us hope. You've made photographs in oceans all around the world. What is it like to shoot in the wetlands in your home province? Well, it means that I can be picky. I can go when it's a beautiful day. You know, I'm not forced by some assignment or something to make images in a short amount of time. I can go back to the place over and over and over and wait for just the right set of circumstances for the images to come together. And, you know, Vancouver Island is such a beautiful place. People travel from all over the world

to go there. So to have it as my backyard is a real privilege. What do you love about, I mean, you spend, it sounds like, a lot of time underwater. What do you love about that? You know, I don't know where that came from. It's been since I was a very small child that I was interested in the ocean. If it was reading time for the class and we'd go down to the library in school, I would always go. I knew exactly where the section on sharks and fish and all that was and spend my time with my nose in those books. And, you know, it probably came from my parents. My dad is a scuba diver and got me into it. But I also think that there's just, that's who I am as a

human. I feel like I was just born that way. Because of that, and because of the work that you do, you spend so much time, it's like you, in this other world that most of us don't get to see. And I mean, you didn't grow up there. You grew up in Regina, which is, is, is not on the ocean, obviously. What do you want us to know about this? As I say, like this other world that we don't, we know from a distance and we know from the surface. Well, to me, it's, it's that there is a whole other world there. And, you know, we spend a lot of time and money and effort studying faraway planets and space, and that's all well and good. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do that, but we've got this other planet right here, and there are

actual aliens there. I mean, if you start to look into any one of the millions of species that live underwater, all of them are incredibly fascinating. And we don't have time to learn about all of them, but they all in some way deserve our attention, our respect, and our protection. Do you still have that sense of wonder when you go under the water and you see those aliens? sense of water, wonder when you go under the water and you see those aliens? Oh, absolutely. If I spend too much time above water, I start to get itchy. It's like an addiction. I need to get my water fixed. I got to get in a lake, a river, an ocean, something. This is a beautiful image. And I mean, it's a prestigious award, but it's also just a sign of the work that you've done

over the course of your career. Congratulations. And thanks for talking to us about it. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Shane Gross is a marine conservationist and wildlife photographer. Lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia

and the UK's Natural History Museum named him Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2024 for that photograph, The Swarm of Life. If you just Google The Swarm of Life, you will see those tadpoles that we were describing. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.