Alumni Profiles: John Aitchison

John Aitchison (Geography, 1984)

By Mark A. Walsh (English, 1997)

‘Oh, I love that book,’ the assistant at the bookshop told me when I ordered John Aitchison’s The Shark and the Albatross. ‘I’m a bit of an Arctic nerd, so this was my kind of thing.’ If you’re about to do an interview, believe me, this is excellent news. The Shark and the Albatross is a fascinating insight into wildlife film-making—and, in many ways, the perfect book for trying times. Poetic evocations of far-flung, exotic nooks of the planet: check. An ode to patience and perseverance: check. A timely reminder of the beauty, fragility and mercilessness of nature: check.

A seasoned wildlife film-maker, John Aitchison is, reassuringly, exactly how you would expect. He’s softly spoken, of course—this is a man who can sit for hours, alone and silent, in a canvas hide—and he has a ready smile. He listens. I suspect that if you were to build an idea in your mind of a wildlife film-maker, you might conjure up someone like John.

He was raised in Portsmouth where his parents would take him on walks around the coast when he was little. Treks on the nearby Farlington Marshes made a particular impression, John says, with flocks of migrating Brent geese, waders and other feeding birds providing spectacular windows on nature ‘away from human stuff out in this wild place in the harbour.’

Even as a youngster, the natural world drew him in. He enjoyed trying to identify the different species with his mother and soon struck a deal with his parents to buy binoculars—if he could raise half the money himself, they would finance the rest. ‘I washed cars and raised pennies that way. And then there was this moment of revelation when it was possible to see the birds much better.... it was a self-discovery type thing.’

John was soon borrowing a camera from his father, himself a keen amateur photographer. As a teenager, he had something of an epiphany. Watching the BBC’s Life on Earth, he said, ‘It dawned on me that there was a job that combined those interests. I happened to have stumbled onto something that combined all the aspects of everything I liked.’

Academically talented, John was encouraged to apply to Cambridge and with his clarity of purpose, John thrived. His Director of Studies in Geography, Dr Jean Grove, encouraged a wanderlust and fostered a get-yourhands-dirty way of learning—music to the ears of a practically-minded student who had grown up with a love of the outdoors. ‘Jean thought we should all travel. She was really quite insistent about it. That stood me in good stead because it meant that by the time I was going to any work-related stuff subsequently, I had done quite a bit of travel—I’d spent a whole summer in Peru when I was 20, on an expedition, because Jean thought it was a good idea. I’d got a taste for it.’

By the time it came to graduating, a fortuitous conversation at a College dinner led to his applying for a job as an assistant film librarian with the RSPB. He didn’t get it, but he made an impression. ‘They kind of invented a job for me, they gave me a kind of researcher job, a dogsbody job really.’ It was on a two-week contract: he stayed for four and a half years. ‘It was great experience, they were making films and I got thrown into lots of different aspects of writing and research. It was like an apprenticeship in every step of the film-making process, especially the editing part of it, which is underrated.’

During that time John met his future wife, Mary-Lou, who was also a budding wildlife film-maker. Up to that point, it had been a difficult industry to crack: those starting out needed an expensive camera to get assignments, but it was difficult to afford the equipment without first having a commission.

‘You had to break that cycle somehow,’ John said. ‘We realised there was an opportunity with the new video cameras coming out that would let you change the lenses. And that meant we could put longer lenses—that’s the critical thing for wildlife filming—you could put telephoto lenses on these little video cameras and film properly things far away.’

Determined to prove themselves, they left the RSPB in 1992, and travelled by train to Hong Kong to buy a cheap camera, organising on the same trip to make three short films, in Thailand, New Zealand and Alaska. The resulting pieces, filmed, edited and produced by the Aitchisons, became their calling card. On the strength of that work, the Aitchisons were contracted by the BBC to make a film about rare great bustards in Spain. John and Mary-Lou worked side by side. ‘It’s very useful to have two people when you’re filming. Two people walk to the hide, one person walks away and the birds relax.’ The gamble had paid off. ‘It did feel like a breakthrough moment,’ John said.

Eager to combine filming and producing, the Aitchisons were then tapped to film episodes of Natural World for the BBC, starting with an eight-month assignment in Aberdeenshire. ‘I remember being very excited about getting to live next to this estuary and film everything that was going on there.’ But making their own programs was gruelling—and slow. ‘You could only make one film about every two years, and it was only on once, for about 50 minutes’.

In six years, the Aitchisons made four films for Natural World. To get more regular work, John pivoted to working with video. His adventures in the following years, such as capturing the likes of penguins and lynx at the snowcovered ends of the globe, tracking down tigers in India and documenting peregrine falcons in Manhattan, formed the basis of a radio series, A View Through the Lens. That series was expanded into his book, The Shark and the Albatross (2015), a timely meditation on the delicacy of the natural system and a clear-eyed exposé of humans’ effect on the environment.

As befits the skilled cameraman he is, John’s writing shifts focus and takes up different perspectives. The title refers to a common penchant in nature films, particularly in the past, of encouraging the viewer to take sides. ‘The way you make films often is to set up a sort of antihero,’ encouraging the viewer to cheer for the albatross’s escape from the shark—but we shouldn’t be for sharks or for albatrosses, we should be thinking, do we want nature or no nature. That’s the choice.’

To that end, the narrative also positions people as fundamental parts of the environment. There are several unusual humans among the wildlife that John meets: researchers among the seals on isolated Bird Island in the South Atlantic, a native American tracker in the Yukon, a woman house-sitting alone in Arctic Norway with polar bears for company.

We’re reminded that Homo sapiens is just one more fascinating, varied species—albeit a powerful and potentially destructive one—and that we would do better to realise our place in the natural world, if we are not to obliterate it. If John’s work serves a higher purpose, it lies in the hope that his films contribute to that understanding. A call to all of us to find our own, inner ‘Arctic nerd.’

‘We’ve got to make that choice now to save the planet. We really don’t have long at all. But I’m not prepared to give up. Even if you’ve got no hope, as soon as you stop trying, you guarantee the outcome.’