Climbing
Today, Renan Ozturk is an award-winning photographer and cinematographer, but what got him noticed was his incredible free soloing, speed climbing and alpine climbing. Here's what he has coming up.
There's heavy emotion in Renan Ozturk's eyes. His sunken brow makes him look stoic, or deep in contemplation, showing the sadness and pain he's endured throughout his long career as an adventure athlete, videographer and photographer.
His 1,000-yard stare comes from his various brushes with death, but he's quick to state that he’s chosen to suffer in the mountains, to free solo an iconic desert tower and to push himself to the edge. After one life-threatening injury, he went through an intensive rehab program so he could climb Meru. His work paid off and in 2011, with Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin, he ascended the Shark's Fin on the 6,660m mountain that's known as “the most technically complicated and dangerous peak in the Himalayas”.
This discomfort makes it into his work. It’s one of his trademarks.
Behind the lens
Ozturk has done more than 25 expeditions to the mountains. "Putting myself in those situations time-after-time, it's what makes life fun and it's what creates good art, so you have to embrace it," he says.
He's a co-founder of the film company Camp 4 Collective, working with clients that Nike, Google, and Apple, and he works as a photojournalist for Sony and National Geographic.
When Ozturk spoke recently from his home outside Salt Lake City, USA he said he and his wife Taylor Rees are finishing a short film called Ashes to Ashes about artists healing from racial trauma. One character survived a lynching in the 1960s.
Another project he's collaborating on, with help from alpinist Freddie Wilkinson, is about the renowned photographer, cartographer and Alaska explorer Bradford Washburn.
Ozturk's budding experiences on the road started in 2002 and includes six years travelling between Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the Bugaboos, and Indian Creek as a member of the Stone Monkeys. This ragtag climbing tribe lived in caves or cars and let out guttural monkey calls whenever they greeted one another.
How it all began
Born in Germany, the son of a Turkish father and mother from the United States, Ozturk grew up with two half-siblings in the coastal town of Barrington in Rhode Island. Even as a youth he loved being above tree line. "I knew there was something there for me. I knew there was something for me in the alpine," he recalls.
He took up technical climbing as a teenager and continued his passion while attending Colorado College. Soon after earning his degree and during an ice-climbing trip to Ouray, Colorado, Ozturk hit a patch of ice in his truck, flew off a cliff and rolled six times before stopping. Miraculously he and his passengers escaped serious injury.
Ozturk crawled out of the wreckage a changed man however. He gave away most of his belongings and followed a path of self-discovery through rock climbing and painting. "My grandparents were in tears because of it, they’re the ones who gave me this privileged education," he says.
His first stop was the crack climber's paradise of Indian Creek, Utah. Within a few days, he met the Stone Monkeys and they became his closest climbing partners.
In the early 2000s, he and the Monkeys made two visits to Bugaboo Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada to put up first ascents. It's those experiences that a decade later led Ozturk to earn National Geographic's Adventurer of the Year award in 2013. "I went out to find what I loved in my community of climbers," Ozturk says. "During that time, I came to recognise the power of storytelling."
Storytelling for social change
Today, Ozturk uses storytelling for social change. "It lends a hand to conservations and stories like The Last Honey Hunter – tribes that may not be around for long," he says.
In 2017's The Last Honey Hunter, Ozturk takes viewers deep into Nepal's Hongu River valley, in search of honey that gets consumers high due to the grayanotoxins in the rhododendron-rich pollen. "You feel a throbbing sensation, like the hum of bees, your eyes flash between light and dark," read the subtitles in the film. Ozturk follows the Honey Hunter under heavy rains and up overhanging cliffs, via ladders made of bamboo and vine.
Once at the giant hives, the Honey Hunter pries them off as bees repeatedly sting his face and exposed skin. In one scene, a man is processing the honeycomb with his bare hands that are swelling up from stings. Bees coat his fingers.
"The goal is to tell true stories in these real places, but at a Hollywood production level," says Ozturk. "It's a balance, just like with climbing."
