FOCUSING ON NATURE
Photographer shares his passion for wildlife
John E. Marriott has been visiting the Canadian Rockies in Alberta for longer than he can remember.
In fact, there is a picture of him as a month-old baby at the Columbia Icefields with his mother. But the first trip he does remember was as a six-year-old. It was the summer of 1975, not long after he received a Kodak Instamatic for his birthday. His family, which lived in Salmon Arm, would make the pilgrimage every summer.
“I remember seeing 11 black bears along the Icefields Parkway and taking crappy, out-of-focus pictures of every single one of them,” says Marriott. “That basically was it. I was hooked.”
Those initial out-of-focus pictures did not make it into Marriott’s Tall Tales, Long Lenses: My Adventures in Photography, although there is a family shot of the six-year-old budding photographer with his family. Tall Tales is Marriott’s seventh book and chronicles his more than 20-year career as a renowned wildlife photographer, from his first sale in 1991 to recent trips to the Khutzeymateen grizzly bear sanctuary in B.C., where Marriott finally got to photograph elusive giant male grizzlies.
That was where he first came across a bear he affectionately named, Frank the Tank, a fearfully large animal whose picture graces the front cover of the book. Throughout the book, we meet other animals that Marriott has photographed over the years. There’s Field, the first grizzly he ever encountered after moving to Banff National Park for a job as a naturalist. Marriott was horrified when Field was later shot by a conservation officer due to the bear’s interactions with humans. We also meet Delinda, the black wolf Marriott first photographed along the Bow Valley Parkway in 2007, who became both a cover image of a Canadian Geographic magazine and the subject of a vehicle wrap on one of Banff’s hybrid buses.
In 2003, he encountered a mom and two bear cubs in a remote area of the Yukon, who spent three hours “tobogganing” and wrestling on a snow slope.
“There’s a lot of emotion and even empathy that you see in animals that people usually don’t attribute to animals,” says Marriott. “It’s quite a treat to get to know a wolf pack or get to know a grizzly bear family and watch them days on end and you see this kind of stuff unfold. Even Frank the Tank, this big snarling grizzly. One of my conservation themes in the book is grizzly bears are not just these big, snarling, intimidating thing. They have a flip side. They have character and personality and they display emotions. You flip open the book and just a few pages in there’s a completely different shot of Frank the Tank laying there with his head on his claws looking very peaceful and gentle.”
John E. Marriott will give a presentation at Fairmont Banff Springs on Dec. 27 at 7 p.m as part of Christmas at the Castle.