Catching up with one of the best photographers on the planet.
Photography :: Jody MacDonald // Words :: Feet Banks. Article sponsored by Citizen Watch.
She’s visited over 100 countries and lived at sea for a decade but, right now, on a break during a solo moto-trip through the Himalayas, Jody MacDonald wants to talk about insignificance.
“I love insignificance. That’s one of the things I love about wide-open, remote places and big mountain landscapes. Just the grandeur and feeling small—it helps give perspective on my life and helps me see what my real problems are and what’s important. It keeps me humble and yeah, I think it’s really important to feel insignificant.”
And when it comes to wide-open spaces that really drive home just how small a person is, Jody has put in her time. She’s hopped freight trains across a 700km stretch of the Saraha desert, this Himalayan moto trip has been going on for three years, and she once spent a decade sailing around the world twice—surfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, and diving from a 60-foot catamaran.
“You have a lot of time to think on those long, long passages where you don’t see land for weeks,” Jody says. “I remember feeling like: I’m a blip. We are a blip. We could die at any moment and nothing would change.”
Jody says she actually thought she was going to die on the first ten days of her first ocean trip when a huge storm that rolled in during a long open-water passage. “That passage was a full-on sailing nightmare—we almost lost the mast, 80-foot rogue waves, seasick the whole time, no one ate. At one point we considered just ramming into a reef to get rescued by a helicopter or something. I remember thinking: I’d rather be eaten by a shark than do what we are doing right now. We limped into Fiji with something like $40-50,000 worth of damage and that was my first ten days of the trip.”
“I love insignificance. That’s one of the things I love about wide-open, remote places and big mountain landscapes.”
Where most rational people would have probably opted to stay on dry land, Jody decided to push on, saying that she knew she would regret it if she gave up. “That’s really a guiding force for me: how am I going to feel if I don’t do it? I don’t know how I will feel if I do, but I definitely know how I will if I don’t.”
It was on that decade-long sailing adventure that Jody began taking her photography more seriously. She’d already been playing around with the camera a lot—shooting photos in university then, later, snapping pics on her adventures climbing, paddling, or as a whitewater rafting guide in British Columbia and Alaska. She’d even landed a coveted photo editor job for iconic Canadian outdoor gear brand Mountain Equipment Co-op. But a windowless basement office is a hard sell for the kind of adventurous spirit and talent that would later land Jody on the 2017 Men’s Journal list of “The 25 most adventurous women of the past 25 years” and after a while she opted to ditch being the person looking at amazing photos of adventures and the backcountry and become the person taking them.
“For me, the process of trying to get a good photograph is hard,” Jody says. “And that is what I love, that process of trying. It’s this never-ending quest to improve how I see the world. It’s light and motion, balance and composition and all these elements coming together. And it has to evoke an emotion in me, in the viewer, in whoever. Just trying to get all those elements come together.”
Jody often succeeds in doing just that. Since 2012, she’s been the recipient of a number of top photography awards, including taking first place in the World Open of Photography and the Red Bull Illume contest. She’s also worked with an extensive list of premier publications, media outlets and brands, including a recent inclusion on the very exclusive Promaster Team for Citizen Watch alongside climber Will Gadd, pilot Jeff Shapiro, and diver/filmmaker Bill Drum. For this current three-year Nepal/India Himalayan moto trip Jody says she is loving her Citizen’s Promaster Tough watch. “I can beat the shit out of it. I have been and you can’t even tell. It doesn’t scratch. It’s the toughest one they have. It’s pretty amazing.”
“The bad stuff that happens to you is the stuff that makes you learn and grow. Those are profound reminders to live your life with purpose and that it’s fulfilling to just do the things you really want to do and spend time with the people you want to spend it with.”
Beyond that, her current travel kit—everything for life on the road— must fit on her Royal Enfield Himalayan motorcycle (no sidecar). “And I’m not traveling light,” Jody laments, “and half of it is camera gear. That is one crappy thing about being a photographer, I end up lugging around too much stuff. I have just two camera bodies and three lenses at the moment, and drones. I like to create kind of a home base somewhere and then go off with a lighter kit for weeks, months…but I also think that makes you a better photographer—when you have limitations in your creativity it forces you to think differently.”
Some of Jody’s most popular work comes from a collaboration with her subjects. She has photographed elephants in India, children in Borneo, camels in the Sahara, BMX riders in Kauai, paragliders in Alaska and much, much more. When collaborating with human subjects, she says certain character traits often seem to make for better sessions.
“It’s great when people are humble or self-deprecating,” she says, “and love to make fun and joke around. Even in the toughest situations, the best people to work with are the ones who are easy going and don’t take life too seriously. It ties back to that idea of insignificance, I guess.”
Insignificance remains a common theme, but Jody says she also values hardship. She knows too well what it’s like to suffer on a trip, or lose a loved one to the life of adventure so many of us pursue, or the sinking feeling of suddenly be faced with a scary medical diagnosis and the mindset required to overcome it.
“In so many ways I am grateful for things like that,” she says. “The bad stuff that happens to you is the stuff that makes you learn and grow. Those are profound reminders to live your life with purpose and that it’s fulfilling to just do the things you really want to do and spend time with the people you want to spend it with. That’s why, whenever I meet someone, I always ask them ‘what are you passionate about? What do you want to do? OK, now go do it. Don’t think about it just go do it.”
And take pictures along the way.
Find more of Jody’s work, stories from her travels and her print store at jodymacdonaldphotography.com and stay up to date on her adventures at her Instagram.
And for a full hour conversation with Jody MacDonald and Mountain Life’s Feet Banks, check out episode 57 of the Live It Up with Mountain Life podcast below.
