A sneak peek into the life of photographer Ejaz Khan & his wildlife passion

It was -49 degree Celsius in the Canadian Arctic. Ejaz Khan waited in the tent, gazing into an unending expanse of snow. White blanketed the earth and the sky.

Khan had his cameras — a Nikon D5 and a D850 — and his Inuit guide Raymond for company. If his cameras came alive occasionally to capture ravens or foxes, Raymond was taciturn. “Raymond, talk to me,” Khan would implore as the silence got to him. In the cold and the quiet, Khan waited, day after day — for the Arctic wolf.

A week into his 11-day trip in March, Khan gave up with no wolf in sight. “I was dying inside. Just sitting in my tent was traumatic,” recalls Khan over Skype from his studio in New York. He and Raymond packed up. Khan decided that he would “live with the humiliation” of not capturing the animal. On the way back, Raymond suddenly stopped his snowmobile. Soon they emerged from the snow: hoary beasts that looked like another shade of white. A pack of Arctic wolves, at last.

Khan, a Mumbai-born, New York-based fashion photographer, fell for wildlife in 2011. His work had featured in magazines like Vogue and Twill but he was feeling burnt out. His wife Maxine put him on a flight to Alaska with a DSLR camera to cheer him up. He shot bald eagles swooping down in the snow and bears digging for clams. He called his family and told them he didn’t want to come back. He eventually did in a couple of weeks but his camera had found two new loves: wildlife and ice. “It’s cold, but heaven can be cold too, right?” he asks.

White as a background enamours Khan. Against it, a lot can look beautiful, even a flock of ravens flying overhead. The ice also gives him intimations of mortality.

One wrong decision about gloves can be life-threatening. When Khan returned from his rendezvous with the Arctic wolves, he had lost nerves in two of his fingers and had frostbite on his face.

Khan plays with black and white. Many of his photographs have a strong sense of movement, too, especially those of the horses of Camargue in the south of France.

He will next climb the Himalayas in the freezing cold of December, looking for snow leopards, which are classified as “vulnerable” in the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Photographs from the project, which is for Nikon, will feature in an exhibition in New York and its proceeds will go to the Big Cat Sanctuary, a wildlife charity.

Khan was born to a filmmaking family in Mumbai; his father Nazar Khan made the films Shaitan Mujrim and Shagoon. At 18, Ejaz decided that he wanted to be a photographer and dropped out of college. He worked in a shoe shop and as a salesperson in a clothing store.

In 1990, he was done with the city and moved to New York with $300 in his pocket. He stayed at a shelter for the homeless and did odd jobs — washing vegetables, loading trucks and filling gas. Khan likens New York to Mumbai. “In both places, you get paid if you work hard,” he laughs.

It was only in 1993 that photography happened to Khan when Maxine gave him a camera as an engagement gift. He started taking photographs for the clothing companies he worked for. Around the turn of the millennium he decided to pursue photography full-time. “In fashion, you are god,” he says.

For his new passion, wildlife photography, he studies the animal and tries to visualise the photograph he wants. Wildlife photography is more about patience than skill or science, he says. “You study the animal and try to predict its behaviour. It’s more about preparing. Get there, and wait for the right moment.”

Be it Alaska or Chile, where he was shooting puma, he says he came across the effects of climate change. In the Arctic, he glimpsed it in the tearing eyes of his stoic Inuit guide. “We were climbing a glacier when I saw Raymond had tears in his eyes. He pointed to a distance and said, ‘There used to be a glacier there. It’s gone now.’” In more ways than one, wildlife photography can be an eye-opener.