Whitewater: Kayaking the Rivers of Antioquia

An adventure and travel photo essay following a whitewater kayaker through the jungle rivers of Antioquia, Colombia — rapids, canyons and green Andean light.

The mountains of Antioquia are cut through with fast, green rivers, and this essay follows a single whitewater kayaker down them, into the rapids, through the canyons, under the jungle canopy. It is adventure photography and travel photography braided together: part sport, part landscape, all about the relationship between one small human, one small boat, and a great deal of moving water.

It is also some of the most physically demanding work I do. To photograph a kayaker in rapids, you have to get to places almost as hard to reach as the ones they are paddling through.

Scale and solitude

The story these pictures tell is one of scale. A bright green kayak is a tiny fleck of colour against a vast grey rush of whitewater, a wall of black canyon rock, a green explosion of jungle. I framed wide on purpose, letting the paddler stay small so the landscape could do the talking. Adventure photography is at its best when it makes you feel how big the world is and how brave you have to be to play in it.

That instinct for scale runs through my travel work, from the tiny figures crossing the frozen plains of the Mountain of Seven Colors to a single boat on the Caribbean at San Andrés. Put a person in a huge place and the photograph gains an emotion no studio can produce.

The green light of the canyon

Jungle rivers have a light all their own: filtered green, humid, contrasty, with sudden bright holes where the canopy breaks. My favourite frame from the trip is the kayaker silhouetted in the mouth of an old stone tunnel, a black cut-out against a blaze of green, carrying the boat toward the water. Sometimes the best adventure image is not the action at all but the quiet, cinematic moment on the way to it.

Shooting in that environment is a constant negotiation with wet gear, unstable footing and fast-changing light, but the reward is a mood you cannot fake: real jungle, real danger, real effort.

“A bright boat, a grey river, and a wall of green. The size of the water is the whole story.”

Respect for the water

There is a kinship between this and my other water work, the dawn nerves of triathletes, the pool grit of water polo players. All of it is really about respect for what water demands of the people who take it on. A whitewater paddler reads a river the way a climber reads a rock face, and photographing that focus is a privilege.

Adventure and outdoor imagery is also some of the most commercially useful travel work there is, exactly what tourism boards and outdoor brands want, so long as it feels genuinely earned rather than staged. Antioquia gave me the real thing.

Bringing it back

These are some of the frames carried out of those canyons: the rapids, the rock, the green light, and one small green boat proving how much beauty there is in going somewhere difficult on purpose.