What might initially draw the eye into the photo series Lowlands are the long lines that naturally extend from the foreground into the far distance, whether they be roads, rivers or fields. But a quiet thesis lies underneath these daily scenes in the Netherlands: how flat the landscape is and how close to the ocean it is. With a quarter of its land below sea level—some of which is reclaimed from the sea only by levees that require constant maintenance—the country faces an existential threat from climate change that could sink more than half of its area underwater.

Shot by Jason van Bruggen, a Canadian photographer of Dutch descent, Lowlands forms one side of a coin with another series, High Arctic, featuring the stately mountains and glaciers and the vibrant communities of the Arctic Circle. “High Arctic and Lowlands present two extremes of the same crisis, revealing how interconnected and unequal the impacts can be,” van Bruggen explains. “This is true of polar regions, where climate change is amplified by latitude, and in low-lying delta areas such as the Netherlands, where sea level rise can rapidly overwhelm and destabilize even the most sophisticated infrastructure.”

Both series focus on revealing the effects of climate change to a larger audience for whom the concept remains too abstract and otherwise invisible to notice. “Photography has the power to bridge that gap, making climate change personal, visceral and immediate,” van Bruggen says. It’s a mission that he takes to heart throughout all his work: documenting and telling stories of both the human condition and the natural condition around the world.

However, photography was not van Bruggen’s first career. “I think it’s my fourth,” he says. Having graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with a master’s degree in history, van Bruggen went on to work as an international development worker, a professional adventurer and then a military contractor. “Studying history sharpened my awareness of narrative, context and the power of human experience,” he explains. “Working as a development worker and a contractor around the world exposed me to the extremes of human experience and the complexity of global systems.” And, taking part in expeditions as an adventurer, he discovered some of his favorite biomes in the Arctic and high-altitude deserts in Afghanistan, Bolivia and Tibet, among others.

Looking back, it actually seems quite natural that van Bruggen took the path to become a photographer, as seeing so much of the remote world ignited a desire to share it with others. “From conflict zones to fragile ecological environments, I witnessed moments that demanded documentation,” he explains. “I became a firm believer in the need to focus on hope and possibility in places that often appeared to lack both. Photography and filmmaking became natural extensions of an impulse I always had: to document the world in real time.”

This did, however, mean he had to make a dramatic career shift and hone his craft under his own direction. “Most people I spoke to about this suggested at the time—and might still agree—that photography was a bad idea,” van Bruggen recalls. “But an opportunity mindset prevailed. There was no formal path that fit the kind of work I wanted to do, so I learned by doing, making mistakes in the field, watching others, and studying light and timing obsessively.”

But he did it all with the goal to continue telling stories and showing them to the world, which also led him to explore the rugged frontier of advertising. van Bruggen discovered that the discipline combined his interests in making an impact and creating visually innovative work with cutting-edge tools. “In advertising, you’re often working with tighter constraints—time, messaging and branding—but that can sharpen creativity,” he explains. “A successful ad connects emotionally while staying true to the client’s voice. It should feel inevitable and unexpected at once.”

While working on a project with ad agency DDB Canada for the Canadian Tourism Commission, van Bruggen met Blaine Pearson, a creative who shared van Bruggen’s passion for crafting purpose-led campaigns. Eventually, in 2012, he and Pearson became partners at their own Toronto-based agency Dot Dot Dash, just as they were partners in marriage. “In many ways, we were ahead of our time,” van Bruggen recalls, “an agency that seamlessly integrated creativity and high-level production while choosing our collaborators based on a shared commitment to a meaningful, forward-looking vision. It’s encouraging to see the industry increasingly move toward the values we built into our company from the beginning.”

Through Dot Dot Dash, van Bruggen has worked for myriad clients from globally based nonprofits Greenpeace and International Women’s Day to outdoor apparel brand Patagonia. In 2016, he traveled for NASA to Swiss Camp, a research station established in Greenland to study the melting ice sheet. The project emerged from his friendship with the glaciologist Dr. Konrad Steffen, who tragically died four years later by falling into a crevasse in the ice—a direct consequence of climate change.

The film documentary and images van Bruggen shot reveal the beauty and danger of researching in such a remote location. “Each day, we’d set out from camp on foot or by snowmobile to collect ice cores and check on distant monitoring stations,” he recalls. “We were quite literally watching Swiss Camp, a decades-old outpost for climate research, melt into the ice. It was one of the most visceral and immediate encounters with climate change I’ve ever had.”

For another Dot Dot Dash project, he traveled to Nunatsiavut, an autonomous region of Newfoundland and Labrador for the Inuit people established in 2005. To benefit from social programs and land use in the region, people must prove their Inuit identity through documentation and community acknowledgement; this, in turn, has pushed members of the community to engage with elements of their indigenous culture, which was van Bruggen’s focus for his documentary with the Nunatsiavut government. “In recent years, there has been a powerful cultural revival—especially among youth and artists—to reclaim their language, stories, food practices and identity on their own terms,” van Bruggen explains. “Through film, photography, writing and advocacy, many Inuit are pushing back against stereotypes and asserting a contemporary, proud and complex identity. They seek to honor the past while evolving into the future. My work featured those on the beneficiary list and especially those who have become modern-day culture keepers, young and old.”

While Pearson and van Bruggen have since divorced, they still work as close collaborators at Dot Dot Dash as well as at Wilder Climate Solutions, a tech agency that finds nature- based solutions to climate change. For one, the company has helped restore local ecosystems by leveraging expertise and the vanguard of tech, like AI, to propagate native flora. “I’ve been shocked at how quickly climate change is impacting local ecology, so I find this to be deeply energizing work,” van Bruggen says.

He has now traded Toronto for Creemore, a town far to the north of the city, where he’s converting an old church to a hybrid studio space. Set among a grove of native trees that he has planted himself, the building provides enough room and natural light for van Bruggen’s photography and filmmaking. “It’s part production house and part creative lab, and it’s adaptable to different kinds of work from thinking and writing to collaborative brainstorming,” he explains. “I want it to feel open to both creative chaos and the discipline needed to finish projects.”

Finding new avenues to blend art and activism remains a core value for van Bruggen’s practice. Due to his talent for composition and framing, his images of the natural world have found their way into gallery spaces. However, van Bruggen finds installations and exhibitions to be better suited for the stories he tells through photography. “Public displays of art have given me the space to explore more abstract themes and visual experiments,” he says. “It’s rewarding to see people engage with the work in such a personal, contemplative way, as well as to see art touch hundreds of thousands of people. Hopefully, it provokes thought in a wide cross section of the population that encounters it.”

One such installation that he recently launched is 80 Faces of Freedom, a project that connects photography and writing to rehumanize the experiences of Dutch people under Nazi occupation during World War II. “80 Faces of Freedom began with a question: How do we honor memory across generations?” he explains. “It was also a deeply personal narrative; my parents were very young during WWII and rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but I understood how profoundly they were impacted by living through the occupation. I photographed survivors of the war—80 in total, one for each year since liberation—linking past learning to present through portraiture and story.”

The project, timed to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Netherlands’s liberation, has been shown in museums across Canada and the Netherlands. It also cogently reflects on the new totalitarian regimes taking power all around the globe, a “reminder of how history doesn’t exactly repeat itself but certainly [rhymes],” as van Bruggen says. “80 Faces of Freedom further deepened my belief in photography as both a mirror and a catalyst. It has confirmed, through feedback, that art can do more than reflect—it can provoke change.”

And whether he’s documenting the physical and existential impacts of climate change from behind the camera or helping create solutions beyond photography, change is what van Bruggen will bring about. ca