Flex Vonmesser

Flex Vonmesser has spent the better part of a decade pointing very long lenses at birds who refuse to behave like birds. He came to photography sideways, through record sleeves and a stubborn belief that the interesting thing is always just outside the frame everyone else is shooting. The penguin work started as a mistake. Sent north on an assignment about sea ice, he found a colony nobody had documented and a species that, for reasons no biologist has yet explained to his satisfaction, had developed a taste for formalwear. He stayed eleven weeks. He has gone back every season since, working from fishing boats, borrowed snowmobiles and one memorably unseaworthy kayak, from the floe edge off Devon Island down to the outport harbours of Newfoundland. He shoots cold, close and patient: no bait, no staging, no second takes. The hat, he insists, was already on.