National Geographic Photographer Joel Sartore

If climbing into piranha filled waters wearing only insect repellent on your wetsuit for protection strikes you as a distinctly bad idea, you haven’t met Joel Sartore. Best known for his photographs of wildlife, particularly endangered species, Sartore wields his camera in the battle to conserve natural spaces and the habitats they support.

In 2001 he spent months traversing the shrinking habitat of the North American grizzly bear, beginning high in the Canadian Rockies, extending south through narrow linkage zones to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The resulting story, “Grizzly,” was selected as the July 2001 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC cover. A two-month assignment to chronicle the wealth of exotic wildlife deep in the Amazon rain forest shared a similar distinction. “Madidi: Will Bolivia Drown Its New National Park?” ran as the March 2000 cover story with a soaring image of brightly colored macaws in flight. “More plant and animal species grace Bolivia’s new Madidi National Park than any other place on Earth, ”explains Sartore. Shortly after the story was published, the Bolivian government abandoned its plans to build a large-scale hydroelectric dam, which would have submerged a large section of this pristine forest. For his latest story in the August 2005 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Sartore journeyed to southwestern Brazil to explore the Pantanal, the world’s largest freshwater wetland.

Sartore graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1985 with a degree in journalism. He spent five years as a photographer for the Wichita Eaglebefore beginning his career with NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC in 1990. In the time that he has been associated with the magazine his photographs have graced the pages of 20 stories. His work has also appeared in Audubon, Life, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Time, and numerous book projects, such as the Day in the Lifeseries. In 1999 he authored Nebraska, Under a Big Red Sky, celebrating the unique people and places of his home. Sartore’s work has been the subject of several television news and documentary programs and has garnered numerous awards. Sartore’s entertaining presentations blend humor with powerful conservation messages and award-winning photography of wildlife and the places they inhabit. As he puts it, “Get an inside look at the pressures of the job and learn how to make the best of the worst, from being charged, skunked, and stung by your subjects. These aren’t your neighbor’s vacation slides.”