The First Thing That Captured My Attention Upon Stepping Into Camille S

Scottish and Cheyenne.

RW:  Wow.

CS:  I met another person who was Lakota Sioux and Korean. So I met all these people and we would share stories and talk about our experiences and sort of figure out how we found our space, which is a hybrid. I still feel today that I’m not black enough to be black. I’m not Italian enough to be Italian. I’m not Indian enough to… I’m a mix. I straddle borders.

RW:  This is the future.

CS:  It is. I mean so many people are entering this community of mixed identity and race and self-definition. And I am definitely part of that group even though it’s not anything new. It’s been happening for thousands of years, but finally now we get to be more than one thing.
     But back to the story of traveling. So the thing that really moved me to California was being attacked on the subway train in New York. I was on the subway one night coming back from a concert with my boyfriend who was a White Russian. His dad was a refugee from Russia, and so he was this blond, blue-eyed big guy. We fell asleep right in the first car, right behind the conductor. And I heard this noise coming through the train. And the next thing you know, I feel a blow to my nose.

RW:  Oh my gosh!

CS:  I was trying to wake up and I see my nose is bleeding. And my boyfriend is waking up. And immediately, just instinctively, I put my out arm, because he was a big white guy. When I looked up there were four or five black guys, young guys. And one of them was really antagonizing me saying, “Oh, if that was my girl, I would this. I would that.” I was wearing a little short kilt, a Scottish kilt. He went to touch my skirt and I smacked his hand away. It’s interesting, because I remember I had no fear at all. I remember being just so angry that this train was full. There were maybe 40 people in there and nobody was saying or doing anything. And even the guy he was with, one of them was saying, “Just leave her alone, man. She’s bleeding. Just leave her alone.” And Issa, my boyfriend, like he’s just trying to get up and I’m like, “Don’t move.” And the guy pulls a knife and he holds it to my face. He’s like, “I will cut you.” I was just so angry, but really contained. I wasn’t scared at all.
     And meanwhile I can see the conductor is looking back like, “Oh god. What do I do?” So she gets us into the station and they move around like they’re going to get off the train. And the guy, as he was getting off the train, leans and punches me square on in my eye so hard that all I see is black. And they immediately close the train doors and sound the alarm. The police show up within probably four minutes. And nobody saw anything. The guys got away.
     I remember feeling like so paranoid, you know, for weeks and months feeling that somebody was going to hurt or strike me. I was really like on edge. I guess it’s PTSD. And so my boyfriend’s mother at the time, this was when you could still travel with other people’s tickets. Said, “Here’s a ticket to San Francisco. Take it. You need a break.”
     So I came out here and I saw this place. It was like, “Oh my goodness. This is amazing!” So I went back and told my boyfriend, “You can come with me or not, but I’m moving.” And I arranged with all of my teachers that I should finish my senior thesis on the road and return and present it. That’s when I was traveling from reservation to reservation. It was part of my thesis. It was about making, sharing stories and photographing them and sharing traditions like how do you do beadwork? It was really an amazing experience. And so I got to California.
    I know looking back, that was a terrible thing to be attacked on a train, but I’m almost grateful because it was the universe’s sharp left turn for me. It was my, “Get out of New York.” Otherwise, my life would be very different.
     So when I was in my 20’s, I had various jobs here in the Bay Area. Then when I was 23, my friend from Long Island, Oliver, came out to live here. He was a surfer. I had just been laid off from my job at an architect firm and was on unemployment for a month or two. He said, “Well, come with me.” So I would go and watch him surf every day. We would go out to Bolinas usually, sometimes Pacifica, different spots. Then one day I was just, “I think I want to try that. That looks pretty amazing!”

RW:  So you must already have been a pretty good swimmer, right?

CS:  Well, growing up on Long Island, absolutely. And I was familiar with the ocean dynamics. 

RW:  So you knew how to deal with the surf, then?

CS:  Exactly. Exactly. But nothing prepared me for surfing. I mean that first time I went out in Bolinas, he suited me up in wet suit, gave me a board, put a leash on and said, “These are the three rules: always come up with your hand over your head so the board doesn’t hit you; don’t turn your back on the ocean; and relax and don’t struggle when you’re underwater.”
     I was like, okay. I started to try to paddle out and my balance was terrible. It felt really awkward. The water was so dark, cold and murky. This was at Bolinas and the Farallons were 29 miles away. And there were all of these great white sharks out there, which meant they could possibly be here. That was all I could think about and I freaked out. I turned to him and was like, “Oliver, I’m scared.” He turned and looked at me and then he paddled away. And I was so mad. I was so angry. I was like, “Oh my god! He was my friend since we were like 16 years old and he just abandoned me.”
     I tried for a while and then it was like, forget this. I got out of the water and just waited for him. I was like you’ve got to get out sometime. And when he came out and I asked, “How could you? I told you I was afraid and you just left me.” And he said something that really resonated. It was really a great truth. He said, “No one can teach you to manage your fears, but you.” And he was right.
     From that day on, I would go out and I would sit on the board. I got a little better at paddling. I got a little better with the balance. And I still sometimes would freak out. Then I would be like, okay, what’s the worst that could happen? Well, a shark could bite you and kill you. Well, is that happening now? No. Okay. You know, you kind of just work through it. What’s the worst that can happen? Well, I can drown. Is that happening now? No. So I surfed for over a year every day. And then I was hooked.
     I fell in love with being in the water that way. You could just sit on top of the water and feel it and watch it and feel this ebb and flow and swell. It was so amazing. I was connected. And I wanted more. We went to Hawaii and getting in that warm water. Oh my god! It was probably the biggest mistake I made, because once you step in warm water, it’s so hard to put a wet suit back on. So then after Hawaii, I was like wow, warm water! I have to keep finding warm water. So that’s when I… 

RW:  You have to go south.

CS:  I just packed up my car with my dog and my surfboard and I headed to Baja. And I lived on the beach for a couple of months. It was a great situation, because I found this spot, Punta Canejo. It was on the southern part California Baja Sur.

RW:  Yeah, yeah. 

CS:  South of Guerrero Negro. There was this little fishing village right there. They would go out and fish every day. And since I was so good at fishing, I’d say can I help you? So I would go out and catch fish with them. They would trade me lobsters for the fish I caught. So I ate lobster almost every night for a month.
 
RW:  And then when did you surf?

CS:  You only had to go out fishing for a couple of hours. You’d come in and then you could surf all day and surf in the evening. 

RW:  Were you alone?

CS:  I was alone, but there were some Canadians.
 
RW:  Surfing? 

CS:  Yeah. I met maybe five or six. And people would come and go. And there were these trees that you could go under. They were low, but they created shade and a little alcove. So you could set your tent in there. It was really quite nice. My dog loved it.

RW:  It sounds absolutely idyllic.

CS:  Well, it was incredible. My dog, I think he really got his wild on. I always made sure he slept in the tent with me, and some nights you could hear the coyotes just circling around the tent, you know, making lots of noise. My dog would be like grrrrr, like he wanted to get out there. In the morning we would come out and there would just be tracks everywhere. You know?

RW:  Wow.

CS:  One of the best experiences I remember is one day I went out and there wasn’t much happening wave-wise. I was just sitting on my board looking at the ocean and then I turned to look back at the shore. I was sitting facing the shore, and like my friend said, never turn your back on the ocean. I was just sitting there thinking, “This is beautiful and it’s amazing.” I felt really at peace. And all of a sudden I heard this [whooshing sound] and it rained on me. My board started to lift up and it was a grey whale breaching right under me. It was literally lifting me up and I was dangling and there was this grey whale right there. It was like whoo! It was scary, but it was also like whoo!

RW:  Wow.

CS:  So it was just stuff like that. Things that I’ll carry with me. So this travel thing was in me. Then I came back. I would work odd jobs so that I could save enough money to go again.

RW:  So that’s fantastic. Now let’s go back to the airline. You accepted to go on a later flight and got the free ticket.

CS:  Exactly. So I am now this fearless surfing traveler and going anywhere on my own is not a problem. So I got this free ticket. I was like well, I guess I better use it. It was the last week of March in 1999. I did a little bit of research because I wanted to literally walk across the Bering Strait where there had been a land bridge. And I learned that, yes, it would still be cold and yes, there would still be sea ice.

RW:  So flew to the most remote place Alaska Airlines went. Right?

CS:  Which was Kotzebue, which is above the Arctic Circle. This is above Nome, even. 

RW:  Okay, okay.

CS:  And there is a museum there for the Bering Land Bridge. This was a theory that this is how the Americas were populated; the Siberian people came across this ice during the last Ice Age. So I was going to do a reverse commute.
     So I arrived there and the first shock was that they lost my luggage with all my warm clothes. It was minus-30 degrees, probably minus-50 with the wind chill.

RW:  And Kotzebue is not a city, right?

CS:  No, there is maybe a thousand people.

RW:  It’s in the snow.

CS:  It’s white. It’s just white. And they even have an artificial runway because it’s all permafrost there. So I step off the plane. I was just was wearing polar fleece and some slip-on shoes. The first breath my nose hairs froze, my lungs froze. It’s this choking kind of cold. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before then.

RW:  Wow. Thirty below zero you said?

CS:  Exactly. So I rush into the Quonset hut, which was the airport. I’m waiting for my bag, which doesn’t show up. All of the women who worked there were Native Inupiaq women. They were like, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll find some stuff for you.” And they totally hooked me up with traditional sealskin parka, hat, gloves, boots—everything.

RW:  They outfitted you in their Native…

CS:  Exactly.

RW:  Which is totally adapted to the climate.

CS:  Thousands of years worth of technology! And it worked. What’s interesting is that when my clothes did arrive, they were nowhere near as efficient as the Native clothes were. But the next day I just woke up and said okay, I’m doing it. And I headed out onto the frozen sea and started walking.

RW:  Now I just wanted to kind of underline this.

CS:  Insanity.

RW:  Yes, exactly. So here you are. You’re in this little tiny place with nothing but snow in every direction. And it’s 30 below in a little Quonset hut in a tiny village. And now you’re going to walk to the edge of the Bering Sea. So you just head straight out alone, right? 

CS:  I just headed straight out. Yes, into the white oblivion.

RW:  Okay, so there you go.

CS:  And I was so euphoric, because as I stepped out onto the ice—and off of what was land, I knew I was on the frozen sea ice—it was squeaky like Styrofoam. 

RW:  This is the snow at that temperature, it squeaks.

CS:  Exactly. It squeaks. And I was like wow! And everything is covered. I’ve got my face in a scarf and you can hear your breathing. This is my lunar moment. I was like, “This is me on another planet. This is my extra-terrestrial experience.” And as I was walking, I was like, “Oh my god. This is amazing!” And I just started walking. There were little twigs in the ice maybe every 10 feet or so. I was like that’s a path. Someone had marked that.

RW:  Oh wow.

CS:  And I was like, that’s great. So I felt reassured by that. Then every 10 minutes or so someone would come up on a snowmobile. They’d say, “Are you okay?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, I’m just going for a walk.” And they’d be like, “Okay.” And they would ride away.

RW:  So are these mostly Inuit people?

CS:  They were all Inupiaq, yes. So every 10 minutes or so I was like, cool, there’s traffic. I don’t have to worry. Then I walked for an hour and there was nothing. I could still turn and see the town. It was there. So I kept walking and after an hour, two people came up, each on a snowmobile; a Russian woman and an Inupiaq man. They asked me a different question, “Where are you going?”
     I said, “I’m trying to get to where the ice ends and the sea begins.” I really thought of it as this clean edge like there would be the ice and then suddenly there would be the water. I was so naïve and stupid. I mean I couldn’t have been more wrong. They said, “Well, that’s 22 miles away.”
    And literally, all I had was my film camera tucked in my parka. I didn’t have water. I didn’t have food. I had nothing—no tent, nothing. So I was like, well, I don’t know.
     They said, “We’re going that way. We can give you a ride, but we’re not coming back. So you have to decide.”
     I thought, “Well, here’s an opportunity. I’ve never been on a snow mobile before.” So I got on the back with the woman and off we went. And I had no idea snowmobiles go 60 miles an hour. So we’re going for about five minutes, really just zipping along the ice. I’m like, “Wow, this is really cool!” Then I started to realize, whoa, we’re going really fast and I did the math in my head, 60 miles an hour times five minutes. Then I was like, “Stop, stop, stop, because I have to walk this back.”
     And at this time of the year the sun just does this really low thing in the sky. It just dips down at about 1:00 in the morning. And it comes back up around 3:00, but it’s so low in the sky, it just hugs the horizon. It’s never high up. So it’s this beautiful thing just watching the sun going sideways. 

RW:  Yeah, yeah.

CS:  So they left me off and it was one of the few times I took the camera out. I took a picture as they took off and watched them until I couldn’t see them anymore, just into the white. Then I remember thinking, wow, that’s pretty amazing to watch them disappear. Then I turned around and looked for the town. It was gone.
     All around me, 360 degrees was just white, just white. There was hardly a difference between the sky and the ice. It was just white. That’s when I freaked out, because nobody in the entire world knew where I was. I could fall through the ice.  There were polar bears out there. There could be a whiteout and I’d never find my way back.
     So this was when that surfing lesson came in handy. I just calmed myself down. Okay, follow the tracks of the snow mobile before they’re gone. Because if the wind blew them away I would really be in trouble. So I calmly walked back.

RW:  Now I think you said there was a moment that occurred right around there that was kind of a pivotal experience.

CS:  As I walked back. Because it took five hours of walking before I could even see the town again. But as I walked back everything that my grandfather had taught me was kind of like activated. It was just like aha! I think they call it a satori moment, or an epiphany. It was a confirmation of everything that my grandfather had been trying to tell me as a child.

RW:  So what was it that you were realizing in this very real way?

CS:  On this extreme part of our planet I was realizing that I was a creature of this planet, that I was literally made of the material of this planet—that we all are. And in those moments, I realized the absurdity of tribe, of border, of culture, of language—because at the bottom of it all, we are all made of this material. We are all earthlings. There is no separation. There is no distinction. None of us were born in outer space. We will all return to the material of this earth.
     What was so clear was that I was standing on my rock in space. I understood the immensity, and also the minuscule nature of that. I understood that I meant nothing in the scale of time and space and history of this planet. That it would blow over my cold dead bones without a thought. But the fact that I could stand there on the ice and actually ponder such things was a miracle. That was a self-realization at its finest. It made me realize what my grandfather was trying to show me.
     I started to think about that; if my sweat becomes the rain, whose sweat is this ice? How many ancestors ago, what creatures created this? They’re all my relations, all my relatives. And in that, I understood the integral nature of this planet—that we truly are a web of life. And how absurd that we’re acting and thinking, in this modernity, that we’re somehow separate or above it, or can do what we want to. So that was really like, whoa… 
     I think I told you before that I discovered when I got home that I was pregnant as I was walking on that ice. So my child was in me growing, and she’s been with me through this whole journey. So it’s sort of this awakening of a mother.

RW:  Oh my gosh.

CS:  And in a real sense. So I told my boyfriend’s mother, who is Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press, about this experience of meeting my planet. She said, “Oh, I have to go check that out.” So she did. She went on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker to the geographic North Pole. She was almost 70 when she went. She was so profoundly moved by this experience that she wanted to write about it. By this time I had my child. And she was like, “We all have to go to this place called Svalbard.” I didn’t ever want to be that cold again. Remember, I moved to California. Alaska was really a cool adventure, but okay. Done, check. You know?

RW:  Right.

CS:  So I was really hesitant. But she is really persuasive. She’s an incredibly powerful and impressive woman. So we went. By this time my child was born and September 11th had happened. It was part of an activation that happened to me. When those buildings fell, I understood that my daughter would never know those buildings in the way that I had. That was a trigger. I mean when I was a bike messenger, I used to deliver things there daily. It was part of my visual landscape. I knew them, that space. And so when they fell, it was the first time I realized the significance of a photo as a historic document—that these were proof that these buildings had existed. It’s the same way that we have pictures of our ancestors as proof that they existed.

RW:  Right.

CS:  And the second part of the trigger that activated me to actually becoming a photographer was we were target aerial bombing, I don’t know, some Middle Eastern country, Iraq or Afghanistan. I just remember watching the news and thinking that we were going the wrong way, that there’s got to be another story being told about how beautiful this life is, how amazing this planet is, how lucky we are to have what we have.
     And in that moment it was if someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, it’s time. We need you to get your ass off the couch and do something. So when Kathan took us to Svalbard, I had many different formats of cameras with me, because the switch was triggered and I was going to photograph it.
     I didn’t have any master plan. I had only heard rumblings of this talk about climate change and global warming. So when we went up there, it was much more an emotional response. I just fell in love with the ship breaking the ice. I fell in love with the sort of muffled sound in that environment. You know, when there’s snow, sound doesn’t move the same way.
     So as a thank you to her for taking us there, we decided to take her to Antarctica for Christmas. My daughter turned five as we travelled to Antarctica in 2005—December 2004, January 2005. We went to a place called the Weddell Sea. In that area I saw my first giant tabular iceberg. When I say giant, I mean like the size of Manhattan-like city blocks. And we had this crazy Norwegian captain who would actually take us between these canyons of icebergs. There would be these towering icebergs, 200, 250 feet above the sea level. Some of them had waterfalls coming off.

RW:  Oh my gosh.

CS:  And some of them had these glowing neon bands just to give a hint of what was below, which was another 800 to 1000 feet of ice. I remember the first time I saw them, I was literally shaking because I was short-circuiting. I was thinking, oh my god, “How much time is this? How many snowflakes is this? How many ancestors?” You know?

RW:   Wow.

CS: What process happened that put this in front of me? And what blesses me to have the privilege to witness this as it enters back to the sea? —maybe 100, 200,000 years after the snowflakes fell to become part of the cycle again. I’ve had some experiences like that since, but that was one of the first where I was just overwhelmed with awe. I recalled this ecstasy of Mary, or St. Theresa or something—this beautiful sculpture in St. Peter’s. It was this moment of ecstasy where I was aware of how tiny I was, but how amazing creation is.
     So those pictures got shown to an editor of National Geographic. I was just doing this on my own. It was a compulsive curiosity. No one assigned me to go. No one paid me to go. And they said we have to acknowledge your effort. So they give me an award and some money. Just having the National Geographic stamp of approval got me access on an expedition on a Russian icebreaker to the far side of Antarctica. On that ship there was a Russian expedition photographer, Pavel Ochinicov. The whole time Pavel was saying, “How do we do this? If I want to get this, how do I set my camera?”—all these technical questions. He was really sweet. At the end he said, “You know, you should have this job. You’d be really good at it.” So he gave me the card for the company and I got hired as the expedition photographer.
 
RW:  For the Russians?

CS:  First for the Russians, and then for the Canadians, and then for the Norwegians, and then for the people from Monaco. I got hired for a lot of different companies and I ended up being the girl in demand on the ships as the expedition photographer.

RW:  Wow, so you did that for several years.

CS:  Yes, from 2006 until 2011. Five years of back and forth; one to three months in the Arctic in our summer and then one to three months in the Antarctic in our winter—every year. That’s up to six months at sea in polar environments. So I like to say that I’m bi-polar.

RW:  [laughs] Right.

CS:  And I really truly was. A few things became alien to me, like trees. Being in polar regions, there’s no trees. Then when you get back, you’re like “Oh, look at that! It’s so beautiful. It’s so green. And it’s, oh my god, it’s sticking out of the ground!”  Because I would spend months not seeing anything disturbing the horizon. And another thing that was really interesting was daylight. I was so used to 2:00 o’clock in the morning looking like daytime that when I got home after an expedition and it was night, I would freak out a little. The sky has gone dark! How does this happen? Where did the sun go? Is everything okay? So it was pretty crazy.
     So those two things were a little trippy. Then in 2007, the UN announced the climate change was real. My phone started ringing. My first exhibition was at the National Academy of Sciences Museum in Washington, D.C. I told them I had never shown my work anywhere. They said, “We don’t care.” So they gave me my first ever solo show.

RW:  That’s amazing.

CS:  Then my first ever print was purchased through the museum at the University of Michigan. I didn’t know anything about editions or sizes or anything. I said, “I’ll call you back.”

RW:  And you mentioned being mentoring by this National Geographic photographer, right?

CS:  Steve McCurry. In the time between going to Svalbard with Kathan and Antarctica with Kathan—from 2003 to 2004 in August I went to Tibet with Steve McCurry.
     When the switch came on for me to be a photographer, I was like there is no way I am going back to school. But there are some questions I had. I realized for me the best way to do things was to literally call people who had done things and ask, “How did you do that?” —and learn from them directly. So I called up Sebastiao Salgado and asked, “How do you handle yourself among people who are starving? Like what is the etiquette? Do you eat or do you go away and eat? Like what do you do?” Stuff like that.

RW:  You talked with him? Was he okay with that?

CS:  Oh yes. But there were some that were, “I can’t help you.” They felt threatened.

RW:  First of all, that’s pretty—it’s logical, but a lot of people wouldn’t have the boldness to make those calls.

CS:  I know that.

RW:  That’s pretty cool that you did.

CS:  I think it’s because one, I felt that I’d been called to service. There was no time to mess around. It wasn’t about me or me being shy.

RW:  Okay.

CS:  It was like I need to get up to speed to do what I am here to do. And there was no time to mess about like oh, I’m sorry. You know what I mean?

RW:  I do.