FROM scaling mountain peaks, being charged by musk oxen and grizzly bears to getting bitten by a sandfly, which resulted in contracting a microscopic flesh-eating parasite that required a month of chemotherapy, there’s really nothing much left to faze wildlife photographer Joel Sartore.
“How many times have you almost been killed?” is a question regularly tossed at the craggy 57-year-old American, and his sheepish admission is: “More than I care to tell my family about, for sure!”
He blithely writes about being in multiple car and truck wrecks while on assignment caused by a myriad of reasons — from bad weather to guides falling asleep at the wheel.
He describes an incident with a helicopter ride that quickly turned nightmarish after the helicopter overheated and was forced to land on a highway. “I’ve put myself in risky situations while working at heights, in swamps and with animals that have sharp teeth,” he reveals on his website.
“I try to learn from my mistakes and not get killed,” he says, adding bluntly: “You can’t take any more pictures if you’re dead. All National Geographic photographers have close calls, and most have gotten hurt or sick in the field.”
So yes, he may be a little hard-core. A beast, even. But it works for Sartore whose photography has taken him all over the globe.
What he hasn’t quite bargained for is an irate bird whose photograph he’s trying to take. Ensconced in a white soft-sided box, the agitated White-crowned hornbill isn’t up to having its photograph taken for the Photo Ark, a collaborative project with National Geographic — and founded by Sartore himself — which aims to document every endangered species living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries all over the world before they disappear.
The project is the subject of National Geographic’s latest documentary Photo Ark: Rarest Creatures, which highlights Sartore’s adventures in traversing the world in search of some of the globe’s most endangered animals and photographing them. This captivating feature is set to debut on Earth Day (April 22) on the National Geographic channel.
In the first scene of the documentary, Sartore meets his match in the form of a very pissed-off bird. “Not a bashful bird… not a bashful bird at all!” he comments wryly while attempting to poke his lens through a slit on the side of the box just moments before the hornbill’s formidable bill comes charging at him through the white screen. “Ow!” he yelps. “That was the nastiest, most badass bird I’ve had to do,” he later confides.
PHOTO ARK
Yet as the hornbill finally glares balefully into his lens, the results are spectacular. Stripped of its habitat, the arresting eye contact and the bird’s features have never been photographed so distinctively before.
“Pictures can have tremendous impact,” he shares over the telephone later. “They’re captivating and surprising, and people will want to look at them and hopefully, be inspired to want to save these animals.”
He’s right, of course. People have indeed been captivated by his unique portraiture of wildlife, so much so that his images have been projected onto the Empire State Building, the United Nations headquarters and St Peter’s basilica in the Vatican.
His approach is deceptively simple — he places individual animals in front of stark white or black backgrounds, mimicking a classic studio shoot. “It’s a great equaliser,” he remarks, adding: “You can’t compare size, so a mouse is every bit as magnificent as a polar bear.”
This way, he insists, ensures that smaller animals are put on equal footing with bigger creatures like tigers and lions. After all, as he reminds me again and again throughout the interview: “Every animal is important!”
Not unlike Noah and his ark from Biblical stories, Sartore’s vision to gather every endangered animal into his virtual “ark” is a task of behemoth proportions. And he wants to do the same — save as many species as he possibly can. “As a wildlife photographer, you can’t help but think of the environment,” he says simply.
Habitat loss and extinction of animal species were common issues that invariably cropped up while working the field for almost two decades. “I spent almost 20 years out in the wild, writing different conservation stories but it didn’t move the needle enough to stop the crisis,” he admits candidly.
But this realisation only hit home when his wife, Kathy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005.
The roaming photojournalist was grounded at home to care for his three children while his wife underwent chemotherapy. Away from his frenetic life of travelling all over the world, Sartore grew introspective. “I had a year to think,” he reveals in a National Geographic interview two years ago.
He thought about famed ornithologist John James Audubon, who painted birds which are now already extinct, and American painter, author and traveller George Catlin who specialised in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. He was determined that he too wanted to create a lasting legacy of capturing animals in photos before they slipped away into obscurity and extinction.
He decided to photograph animals at the zoo located just a mile away from his home, beginning with the naked mole rat. Adopting a different tact, Sartore used portrait-styled photography to capture the mole rat’s form, features and its penetrating gaze.
It was with this diminutive animal that the photographer hit the all the right notes. He shot exquisitely-lit portraits of the naked mole rat, highlighting its unique underrated beauty which enabled viewers to look at the creature directly in the eye. The naked mole rat at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo earned the honour of becoming the first animal to clamber on board the Ark.
As his wife recovered from her brush with death, Sartore found his newest calling in giving life to animals that were inevitably moving closer to extinction. “I decided to photograph animal species in a way that will inspire and draw people to care about their fate,” he explains, adding: “Hopefully these images might be the catalyst these animals need for people to start protecting wildlife and nature.” The Photo Ark was born.
NATURE LOVER
Caring about nature has literally been Sartore’s second nature — a trait he attributes to his late parents. “They instilled in my brother and me a real desire to see nature saved and to also celebrate the world around us. I’m forever grateful to them.”
His first encounter with an extinct species was from a set of Time-Life magazines belonging to his mother. Featured in one of the magazines were several birds that have gone extinct, including the heath hen, the great auk, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon. The latter was a bird named Martha, last shown alive in a photo taken just before her death in the Cincinnati Zoo back in 1914.
“I was astounded,” he writes on his website. “Passenger pigeons were once in numerous numbers with an estimated population of five billion and here it was reduced to this single female, with no hope of saving it.”
He couldn’t understand how anyone could tolerate this. “I still feel the same way, and I work hard to prevent this from ever happening again. Of course, things have gone much further downhill since then, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all keep trying.”
The Nebraskan native got into photography in college after borrowing an old Olympus camera from a friend’s father. He attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and — after changing majors a couple of times and taking classes in everything from astronomy to beekeeping — finally majored in reporting. “My parents knew better than to try to tell me what to do!” he jokes. At university, he worked for the campus paper and took pictures constantly.
His degree in reporting, says Sartore, helped complement his love for photography. “That helped me tremendously in just being able to tell stories and be accurate and truthful,” he explains, adding that journalism helped him take on any animal and figure out what their most interesting assets are, the threats to that animal and communicate that information fairly, distinctly and clearly.
“At that time, I just wanted to take pictures,” he admits, adding: “But I’m glad it worked out that way because writing, being able to speak and communicate well are really key to what I do as much as photography.”
His first assignment as a photographer was for a newspaper in Wichita, Kansas — a job he held for six years — first as a photographer, then as their director of photography. But wildlife photography beckoned when he met renowned National Geographic photographer James Stanfield who looked through his portfolio and recommended him to the Society.
For the next two years, he sent in clips of his best work from the newspaper. That eventually led to a one-day assignment, followed a few months later by a nine-day assignment, and so on. “I worked like crazy on those assignments — and each one since — and did everything I could to ensure the photos were stellar,” he recalls on his website.
He considers his affiliation with National Geographic one of his biggest achievements. “Having my first story published by the National Geographic magazine was a big deal. It’s like climbing Mount Everest; it’s every photographer’s dream to get published. That was an amazing experience and one I would never forget,” he shares, proudly, adding: “I’m just a guy from Nebraska who’s a pretty hard worker. I never imagined when I was a kid that I’ll be working with the National Geographic one day!”
MOVING FORWARD
Sartore has travelled to Malaysia to photograph the Helmeted hornbill and the milky stork at the Penang Botanical garden, as well as the Bornean bearded pig at the Taiping zoo. “I remember Malaysia as being very hot!” he quips.
Photographing the Helmeted hornbill was a “… really big deal as they’re super rare!” and he tells me that he finds Malaysian wildlife diversity amazing. “There are animals in the Malaysian zoos that you don’t see anywhere in the world. I’d love to return sometime if we’re ever allowed to travel again!”
In this season of the coronavirus pandemic, Sartore is back ensconced at home in Nebraska puttering around the house “… and doing tasks my wife tells me I’ve neglected for 22 years!” he jokes.
But the onslaught of the coronavirus is no laughing matter, he says. “I hope it’ll wake people up to the fact that we shouldn’t be killing wildlife, we shouldn’t be eating bats, we shouldn’t be bulldozing nature. We released this disease that can jump from wildlife to people, and we’re paying the price for it.”
He points out that it’s actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December last year to arise — with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.
“We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to bushmeat markets. We disrupt ecosystems and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we’re it,” he says bluntly.
Habitat destruction, wildlife poaching and illegal trafficking has led to these perilous times, and Sartore’s clarion call through the Photo Ark to save the environment, forests and invariably, its wildlife, seems even more urgent now, more than any other times. Save the planet and you’ll save its creatures. That point seems obvious. It turns out, however, that the reverse is true, too.
A growing body of research suggests that the decline of many of Earth's largest and most majestic animals — such as elephants, wolves and whales — could actually speed up global warming because of the underappreciated role they play in mopping up carbon dioxide emissions.
“We have to save some of nature just to keep the climate stable,” agrees Sartore, concluding: “The animals I document are going extinct at rates that should really make you stop and think. As these animals go away, so could we. People should think about what they can do to save the planet.
Photo Ark: Rarest Creatures premieres on Wednesday, April 22 @ 8pm on the National Geographic channel — Astro Channels 571 and 551 (HD) / Unifi TV Channel 508.