Robin O’Neill’s Bridge for Connection

There was an old film camera in the hutch of Robin O’Neill’s dad’s house in Ontario, Canada. Before leaving for Guyana in 1995 for a university community service trip, the 23-year-old grabbed the camera on a whim, thinking it would be nice to capture the experience. On the flight, she read the manual. She spent the bulk of her two and a half months in Guyana building a community center and helping with various medical projects, and continued to volunteer for the next three years, traveling to Africa and South America. She brought that film camera wherever she went. 

Robin documented each trip, drawn to the way it connected her with each community. Back home, she organized art show fundraisers and sold prints, sending the profits back to the communities—as her shows grew, she wondered if photography could be more than just a hobby. In 1998, while working day jobs as a tennis instructor and legal secretary, Robin went back to school at the Western Academy of Photography in Victoria, BC, at the age of 25. “The only thing that seemed to fit for me was photography,” she says.

Thirty years after borrowing her dad’s film camera, Robin has evolved from a hobbyist to a leading commercial photographer, capturing skiing, mountain biking, climbing and mountain culture for brands like Arc’teryx, The North Face and Nike. But action sports photography was never the intended plan. “If you asked anyone I went to university with if I would be a ski or mountain bike photographer, they’d fall out of their chair laughing,” she says. Robin is from the flatlands of Ontario, and neither skied nor mountain biked as a kid. When she began seriously pursuing photography, she envisioned herself capturing stories for National Geographic or creating documentary work for non-profit organizations.

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