The Day He Wrote His Mother's Eulogy, He Decided to Put 30 Years of Wild Gazes Into a Book

The day he wrote his mother's eulogy, what came to Paul Nicklen's mind wasn't some award-winning photo, but the bond of motherhood in the natural world—how animals protect their young, how ecosystems hold each other together. That private moment became the starting point for his latest photo book, Reverence. The scope is substantial: 200 carefully chosen images across 344 pages. It took Nicklen over a year of editing to compress 30 years of a photography career into this single volume.

But what really gives this book its weight isn't the page count—it's what he's actually done. Shooting a narwhal feature for National Geographic, Nicklen spent over five years returning to the same stretch of ocean year after year, waiting for the whales to appear. What came out of it wasn't just photographs—it exposed the scale of an unregulated narwhal tusk trade, directly leading to Canada's export ban on narwhal tusks. He's also captured notoriously elusive species like spirit bears and sea wolves, racking up over 30 photography and conservation awards along the way, including BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the World Press Photo Award. In 2014, he co-founded SeaLegacy with fellow Rolex ambassador Cristina Mittermeier, continuing to push for enforcement of the narwhal tusk ban and intervening to block supertankers from docking along the coast of British Columbia, Canada—all things that happened beyond the photographs.

His patience was, in a way, forged in childhood. Nicklen grew up in an Inuit community in Canada's Arctic, where his parents encouraged him to explore the harsh landscape freely. He later spent four years working as a government wildlife biologist, calculating hunting quotas—a job that gave him a rather bleak new understanding of what it means to be "close to nature." At 25, he went alone to live in the wilderness of Canada's Northwest Territories for three months, and came back with a conviction to speak up for endangered species. The real turning point came when he met legendary whale photographer Flip Nicklin in the Arctic; that mentorship led to his first National Geographic assignment in 2001, kicking off a 20-year photography journey.

Reverence isn't just a retrospective collection. A portion of the proceeds from book and photo sales will go to conservation organizations around the world, including reforestation efforts in Africa and beach cleanup and coral planting work in Indonesia. Nicklen himself says the book carries his sense of reverence for nature, and what he wants to remind people of is this: "Getting to live on this planet is a gift, and protecting our home has become an urgent matter."

Reverence was produced with support from Rolex's Perpetual Planet Initiative. Launched in 2019, the initiative now boasts over 30 partners spanning ocean conservation, terrestrial environments, and the three fields of science, medicine, and technology, with ocean advocates like Nicklen and Sylvia Earle among its ranks.