The white continent
June 2015

"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle;
you can live as everything is a miracle."
- Albert Einstein
I was on the brink of achieving a lifelong goal. My left hand, encased in a thick winter glove, struggled for grip on the side of the Zodiac boat as we bounced uncomfortably over choppy waves. Held firmly in my right hand was my Canon 6D: my long-time companion and the inspiration behind my arduous journey. I raised the camera to my eye, aligned the polarizing filter and adjusted the aperture. The shoreline came into focus. Penguins tottered distractedly to and fro, as jagged white peaks rose starkly behind them. After more than a year of planning, three long flights, a 36-hour boat journey crossing the Drake Passage, home to the roughest seas in the world, and now this final sprint ashore in our inflatable Zodiac, I had reached Antarctica.
As I peered through the viewfinder, the same way I had done thousands of times before, my mind wandered back across the defining images of the preceding years. How did I end up here?
Photograph One: A picturesque village scene, minutes from home in the English countryside.
The image now seemed small, no bigger than a postcard, worn around the edges, with an aged, sepia tone.
My early years were spent in Cirencester, England, a quiet town of 20,000 people in the Cotswolds. In place of a shopping mall or cinema, small antique shops and a 12th century church lined the streets. I found escape watching hours on end of David Attenborough’s “Planet Earth”, before setting out to conduct my own solitary photography expeditions exploring the countryside around my house. A seed of inspiration and curiosity had been planted, which now, years later, saw me setting foot on The White Continent.
As I grew older and prepared to begin my professional career, I was determined to challenge myself by diving into the unknown. I couldn’t imagine anywhere more foreign or unnerving than the cutthroat world of sales and trading. Yet I was spurred on by a deep desire to prove myself.
Photograph Two: The City of London, a chaotic trading floor as the opening bell rings and traders leap into action. Energy bursts out of every corner of the picture, the scene blurred with a loud flurry of movement as numbers
stream across screens, lights flash brightly and phones ring incessantly.
One year later, I realised with surprise that I had begun to feel at home on the trading floor. I had worked hard to be more vocal, had learnt to assert myself, and had fallen in love with the fast-paced, high-pressure environment.
Beneath the superficial thrill of daily activities though, I still felt unfulfilled. When the Japanese earthquake struck in March 2011, the market turmoil was unlike anything I had experienced. As a trading team, we had one of the most profitable days in the firm’s history, and yet as my fellow traders stood around me high-fiving and slapping each other on the back, I struggled with the morality of the situation. Once again, I found myself absorbed in reflection. I began to question whether I should be applying myself elsewhere.
Photograph Three: The broad smile of a friend as she stands on her porch in the outskirts of Arusha, Tanzania.
Farmland and sugarcane surround the house, children run excitedly back and forth in the foreground.
Warmth, colour, life and vitality fill the frame.
Four months later and I found myself volunteering at a school in Tanzania, putting my skills to the test in a new setting. Anna, the friend in the photo, was a teacher, cook and caregiver to the children. She shared her house with her daughter, two sons, three adopted nieces and nephews… and the fifteen other children from the surrounding village who showed up daily to learn in the small converted schoolroom she had created in the fourth room of her house.
I arrived with the intention of sharing my passion for numbers and language with the children, but ended up spending each afternoon working with Anna. She had begun to draw up plans to erect a new house on a plot of nearby farmland in order to accommodate volunteers, attract tourists and invest the proceeds in the school. Together, we calculated construction costs and built a business plan.
Despite having to leave before the project reached completion, I returned to the trading floor with a renewed perspective. I realised the potential of the skills I was developing through finance. For the first time I understood that my career path was complementary rather than contradictory to my long-term aspirations: tackling global poverty and promoting social change through an analytical, data-driven, private-sector approach.
Photograph Four? Ice? Penguins? Mountains?
I was jolted back to Antarctica as the Zodiac covered the last few feet and slid ashore. It no longer seemed so strange to be sitting in a small inflatable boat in subzero temperatures with six strangers.
I was finally ready to take the next picture...
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