Adventure Photographer Trevor Clark – Part 1

“What do you do?”

We all get asked that common social question. Rarely does one’s job title paint an complete picture of who that person is as a whole. A more accurate question for Trevor Clark would be, “what don’t you do?”

Trevor is one of those who does what many people only dream about or believe impossible. A self-described Adventure Photographer, Trevor lives and works wherever a story takes him. Whether kayaking, sailing, snowboarding or any other outdoor activity, he is there to capture it and tell a story.

Trevor was kind enough to allow us to interview him. He was in Georgia, parking the custom 4×4 Van he lives and works out of most often, before flying to Hawaii to live aboard a sailboat for a few months.

He gave us so much good information, we decided to post the interview in two parts. We’ll go over his background and get a general idea of his lifestyle first. Part two will cover the tools and equipment that makes this lifestyle possible.

First, tell us a bit about yourself. Your job title or what you do or consider yourself to be.

Well, I would say that I am an adventure photographer. I am on the road 12 months out of the year working from a 4×4 Sportsmobile converted studio/van. My life and work are one in the same. I am a photographer first, but also a whitewater kayaker, sea kayaker, kiteboarder, back-country snowboarder, wakeboarder, sailor and all around outdoor addict. The activities I get into are a tool for getting me into the situations and stories I want to shoot. I am 26 years old, self-employed and mobile.

Can you tell us first a bit about what kind of work you do? Your work/school background? Was any of your education related to what you ended up doing?

My work is focused on documenting adventure sports and telling the stories of the people who truly live by them. Even a rapid can have a story, and I have found it is very rewarding to try to show these stories from an insider’s perspective. I rarely shoot something that I am not intimately involved with myself, and that has been a very conscious decision in my approach.

If there is something that I would like to shoot, but am not an active participant in, then I will do everything I can to get into it or somehow work on an understanding from the perspective of that activity. I focus on adventure sports, but more importantly, it is about the places those activities take us and the experiences we can have just by kayaking or skiing, or whatever the case may be.

I have a BA in Magazine Journalism with an Emphasis on Photography from the University of Georgia. Though in magazines, my photo program was newspaper based, and even though I never thought that was my path, it was a very crucial and necessary step in my development. The newspaper background has absolutely helped shape my approach, my thoughts and my need for a story.

After college, I did some traveling and guiding, then settled in with a newspaper group and worked with another photographer in the Lake Tahoe area to hone in on some skills and really make my big push toward shooting on my own.

What made you decide on this kind of work life? Was this something you always wanted or knew you would do, or something accidental?

I was lucky enough to do a lot of traveling and living abroad as a kid, and I would say that started my interest in people and places. Any time I would see images, I would think about what it must have been like to be in that image, to be there in that spot and in that moment.

I know I started associating feelings and emotions with pictures from an early age, and it also didn’t hurt that my grandmother (who I traveled to Australia to see) had a library of National Geographic Magazines dating back to the early 1900s. That said, I actually didn’t really pick up a camera until I was in college, but that was a very powerful day.

Since then, every ounce of my energy has been directed toward what I am doing right now and what I intend to do down the road.

Do you have a “home base” where you live or have an office? How often do you travel away from home for your job and projects, on average?

My “home base” is currently my 4×4 Sportsmobile converted Ford E-350 studio/van. I am on the road 365 days a year, but I am also always home, and that was the premise behind shifting my life into a vehicle. That said, there are travel circumstances that separate me from El Guapo (the acquired name for my van), but they aren’t all that frequent.

I think this year I will have spent about three to three and a half months away from the van, traveling and working from whatever vehicle, boat or other vessel I end up in.

What countries have you worked or done projects in while doing this type of work?

So far I have been localized to the US, Mexico and Canada in my professional life because that is about as far as I want to drive my office, but I have a few things in the works right now that might land me in South America, Africa or Mongolia in the next year.

Are there any other languages you speak fluently? In the countries you’ve traveled, has language ever been a problem?

I was actually born in Curitiba, Brazil, then moved to Sao Paolo, then Montreal, Quebec before my family finally ended up in Georgia. I grew up speaking English and Portuguese, then I traded out the Portuguese for French. Once we made it to Georgia, Spanish seemed like the next logical thing, so I jumped into that. I also minored in Spanish in college.

Of course, it has been a few years since my formal training ended, and I have not spent much time in any of these places since then, so I am definitely rusty. There is a solid understanding for me behind romance languages in general, so I can get along okay when I do travel abroad. That said, I would love to spend a sizable amount of time in any of those countries and focus on being more conversational.

Do you have an office in a home city besides El Guapo? Is it a priority for you to have an “office” at all for you?

I do not currently have an immobile office, but I am working in that direction. Ideally, I would still be on the road, and not a whole lot would change from a lifestyle perspective, but I would have somewhere to be whenever I feel the need to settle in for a little while.

Being that I still wouldn’t be around all that much, I would also like to have someone handling a few items part-time so that I could focus more on shooting. The toughest part is figuring out where to put down some roots.

If you could change anything about your job, would you? And what would you change?

Yep, I would have two of me, maybe three, just to even out the responsibilities a bit, but that’s it.

Part Two of our interview with Trevor Clark with be posted next week. We will talk more with him about the tools he uses to work and live such a mobile lifestyle.

You can find Trevor on his website at www.trevorclarkphoto.com. You can also follow his adventures on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Tagged as: Freelance, Photography, Sportsmobile, Vandweller

Image Source