Q&A: Century City Photographer Recognized For Conservation Efforts, Part 1

Westwood-Century City Patch sat down with local conservation photographer Ian Shive for an interview about his work. A Century City resident, Shive has traveled the world for photography and the Sierra Club awarded him the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography this year. He is the author of National Parks: Our American Landscape, now in its fourth edition.

The second part of this interview will be published Tuesday on Westwood-Century City Patch.

Patch: Which came first -- photography or your love of nature? It sounds like both happened when you were pretty young.

Ian Shive: My father was a photographer and when I think back about it, I remember my dad taking pictures of my playing in nature so I think it was simultaneous. What I love most, I would say nature. The moment it really struck me on a conscious level was when I went to college in Montana. Those contrasts between growing up in New Jersey…and then going to one of the most remote and stunningly beautiful parts of our country. Then what followed was photography because I wanted to capture those experiences and share them with people back home. From there, the two, like a double helix in DNA, they are one and the same.

Are you self taught?

Yeah, I think so. I didn't go to school for photography but I'm the son of a photographer so there was an osmosis effect. My parents gave me my first 35mm camera when I was in college. I wasn't happy with my photos because they didn't really represent the experience I was having personally and so that's something that I worked on for years until I really started to get it.

That sounds like a really common frustration with photography, even just amateur shots not looking anything like what you remember. It seems like that would be one of the greatest challenges of your career to overcome whatever was in your way.

When your image reflects what it is you saw in your head, that's when you know you've become a photographer.

Are you there yet?

Yeah, I've been there for a few years and now I don't think about my process at all. I more or less go after the experience now. My fingers are their own mind at this point when I have a camera in my hands. A lot of the pros I know, it's the same thing. It's the ability to respond and people think, 'well, it's nature photography, that mountain's been there for a thousand years, do you really have to respond quickly?' And the truth is, it's weather based, people make the shot, it's usually fleeting moments. It's photographing in an intense environment -- it just happens to be stunningly beautiful.

Moving from Montana to here must have been really jarring.

I've been in LA now 14 years. I've lived in Century City for 7. My first two years, I couldn't get into LA. I came here for the film industry and got a job at a studio and that's I think a big part of why I stayed here for so long. That escape from LA and the studio certainly was what kept driving the photography. I'd get out of LA every chance I got. I'd go to Yosemite, Yellowstone, and I did that for years. It wasn't because I disliked it here, I just still like getting perspective and I love traveling. Now I'm gone a lot more.

When you would go away, what would happen to those photos? What was the turning point from hobby to profession?

I still don't know why I felt a need to get my images published other than that I wanted to take the sharing beyond. I had my first website in 1999 or 2000, before Flickr, so I created a website for my family and friends but what I didn't think about was that anybody could see that site. I started getting feedback from other people and that was cool, but I still didn't think of it as a career option. The turning point was probably when I tried to get more criticism, I tried to get it on a professional level. I found an agency and when I had images I felt really good about, I would submit them and they would market them. The kicker was, I only took 10 of my images to begin with and forgot about them, and four months later, I got my royalty report and they sold two, one to National Geographic and one to Time. And then a little lightbulb went off. That became the beginning of what I would say was an obsession to shoot and build an archive, again not thinking of it as a career path until several years later until they were selling every month. That's when I realized that I really loved it and this was what was driving me.

Did you even know that your photo was published in Time?

That one was a two-page spread in Time Magazine from a weekend trip. I found out after the fact and had to hunt it down. I think I ended up finding it in a doctor's office.

You make these beautiful landscape photographs but then you have a newsy element to your photos, like the mountain rescue on Mt. Whitney, and then also when your photos are used to editorialize a point. Were you comfortable with that in the beginning?

No. I wasn't at all. I was way out of my comfort zone on the mountaineering story on Mt. Whitney. I was the first photojournalist to ever climb with search and rescue on that mountain. That was my first big multi week assignment after I left my studio job, so a) i'm not going to pass my first big assignment and b) it was a unique opportunity and it was in a national park and it was a national park in a way people had never seen, which then became the trend there out. For me, it was about showing people places we thought we knew but didn't. That story made me realize that you can sit there and photograph calendar pictures all year long but you can't photograph the environment and forget about one of the key elements that effect the environment, and that's people. That's when I started thinking about keeping people in photographs to show that, or just to show scale and impact.

So you just called yourself a photojournalist. Do you consider yourself one?

I consider myself an environmental journalist, which these days is not just photography. There's multimedia, I do interviews, I write. Because of the structure of this business, you have to be a multi-tasking person. So yes, I only focus on the environment, photography will always be the core of what I do and everything else I do will just support that.

And then you got into advocacy. How did that happen?

When you work with a non profit, your stories aren't just illustrating a story about a visit. They're probably about saving a place, conserving a species. As an outdoor photographer, your client base alone introduces to that, whether you like it or not. If I can take so much from a place as a photographer -- you know, peace of mind, enjoyment, a career, my life, my income -- what do I give back? The advocacy is a way to give back to that and to continue extending the very root of my photography.

So you became comfortable with your images telling a specific story and now you must find yourself in that situation a lot.

I do -- I'm a conservation photographer, and it's a conscious decision. It's one thing if you're a journalist and you're taking a position on a story you're writing and you don't tell anyone, but I'm up front about it. I don't think there's a right or a wrong if you tell people where you're coming from.

This interview was edited and condensed for length and clarity.