Into the Wild
the Arctic. “I always wanted the opportunity to show what one can deliver if you just
give all that you’ve got,” Schulz says. “In a way it was really encouraging, because
so many things worked out. I got to places and some of the most dramatic things
unfolded.”
Perhaps the most important leap of faith Schulz made was the one that launched
his career. Schulz was deeply engaged with wildlife as a child, and would often venture
out into the woods to observe birds, or, he remembers, a fox den near his house. “After
a while I realized I saw these amazing things and I would come home and tell friends
about it, and they weren’t quite able to recognize what it was like or able to imagine the
images that I saw,” Schulz recalls. “That’s when I realized I needed to bring home im-
ages for them to really understand what it was like to be out there in that moment, to
watch the little fox pups playing with each other, or [see] an incredible, beautiful bird.”
Though he began photographing nature as a teen, he enrolled in Heidelberg
University “because everybody told me it’s not possible to make a living in nature
photography,” he recalls. “Everybody warned me and said: This is one of the hardest
fields to make a living at. And they’re right, it’s very true.”
In 2000, however, Schulz decided to leave school. “I said, ‘I’m not going to live a
life based on fear that I’m not going to be successful at something,’” he recalls.
Schulz borrowed as much money as he could and went to work. Rather than think-
ing of wildlife photography as a career, Schulz told himself, “This is my life.”
“Once I did that I kept on fighting for it, won awards from the BBC, realized the level
of photography [I created] was accepted and the quality was there,” Schulz explains.
Schulz has repeatedly invested in new equipment and new projects, challenging him-
self, he says, to produce images “in the highest quality form that was possible.”
One of the founders of the International League of Conservation Photographers,
Schulz has been committed to promoting the creation and maintenance of “wildlife
corridors,” migratory passages that allow animals to move between interconnected
ecosystems. Through research and relationships he developed with conservation-
ists and scientists early in his career, Schulz came to understand the corridor concept
and has devoted his work to it. “If you spend a lot of time out in nature and confront
yourself with the topics, it’s really not too farfetched to understand that our natural
systems only work in an interconnected way,” Schulz says.
His first book, Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam, which, through Schulz’s
photographs and essays by leading scientists and conservationists, espoused the
necessity of a wildlife corridor between Yellowstone National Park in the American
West and Canada’s Yukon territory, received an “Outstanding Book of the Year”
