A ‘dirtbag’ at heart: Paul Bride brings a life of adventure into focus in new photography book

Adventure photographer Paul Bride has spent almost three decades shooting photos around the world. But ask the Britannia Beach resident what’s left on his wish list and he’s reluctant to get into specifics.

“Oh my God, the wish list is huge,” said Bride. “But it’s something usually I don’t talk about because I feel like I’m kind of jinxing if I talk about it. It gets longer every year.”

For now, there is plenty to look back on. His first book, Paul Bride: Until the Light Dies, brings together more than 200 photographs, most never previously published or posted, in five sections: Climbing, People, Water, Travel and Storms. Each section opens with a double-page fold-out.

Bride had long considered making a book. Finding the time was another matter. His wife would meet him at the airport to swap his bags, he said, before he headed out again. In one particularly busy year about a decade ago, he counted 143 flights.

A sought-after commercial photographer, Bride has worked on campaigns for the likes of Arc’teryx, Kuiu, Patagonia, the Mountain Equipment Company (MEC), Mitsubishi Motors Canada, Red Bull, Whistler Blackcomb, and Yeti.

COVID-19 gave him time to revisit his archive. Then, he said, a bout of pericarditis left him in bed for about three months. As he began pulling photographs and writing, an idea took shape: not a climbing book or a travel book, but something that could accommodate the breadth of his experience.

“My photography is kind of my journal. I can look at an image, and I can remember the morning and the afternoon, and I can remember all that stuff,” said Bride when asked about keeping track of all his adventures.

Putting those memories into words presented a different challenge.

“Writing has never been a strong suit for me,” said Bride. “I’ve written some articles for magazines before in the outdoor industry, and actually, once I had an editor tell me it was a good thing that my photos were good.”

When the publisher, Figure 1 Publishing, raised the possibility of a ghostwriter, he decided to challenge himself to do the writing. The introduction and extended captions would need to convey more than the circumstances of a shot. He wanted to get at what it felt like to be there and what he experienced. The result is a lot of great personal stories about how the photos came about and what it took to take them.

“I just said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna find my voice,’ ” said Bride.

That willingness to find his own way goes back to his youth. Growing up in suburban Mississauga, Ont., Bride wasn’t drawn to the future a school counsellor proposed for him: climbing the corporate ladder. His father, a banker, offered to help him get a bank job. Bride figured that arrangement would end badly for both of them.