Listen: Superstar TED-talk photographer Chris Burkard on buying Icelandic citizenship, the ghost of Brigham Young and dying of hypothermia on an Arctic Beach: “I saw a seagull circling above me…and I was thinking, cool, this is how I’m going to die.”

A life lived rich and beautiful.

Today’s guest on Dirty Water, Chris Burkard, is to surf photography what Galileo was to astronomy; he is a man who was courted by TED talks, an organisation that has hosted Alain de Botton, Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Gates, who warned us in 2015, of the certainty of a pandemic.

Burkard is thirty-four years old, comes from San Luis Obispo in Central California, and made his name, initially, as a surf photographer via work with Transworld Surf, Surfer and Surfline, before swinging into filmmaking (See Netflix’s star-porn film Under An Arctic Sky).

He has been swamped by innumerable photography and filmmaking awards, has published half-a-dozen books and made four feature-length films, including the aforementioned Under an Arctic Sky.

Best of all, Burkard brings the spirit of Brigham Young into the modern age, although we hope, like Young, he isn’t brought to a premature end by cholera morbus and inflammation of the bowels. 

A highlight, of the interview, at least for me, is Burkard describing how he had to barricade himself in his hotel room on magazine surf trips to avoid collisions of the flesh etc.