Good evening. Working for the National Geographic has been the best experience that I can imagine. It's hard to translate that into emotion to something other people can understand. When I was growing up, I was not the guy that people would have expected to have the career of his dreams. First, I was born in Hays, Kansas. Which is not the intersection of art, culture, and science. And on top of that school was really difficult. Not just hard, but I was dyslexic. And I had a hard time reading, writing, anything that had to do with school, except for art, was difficult for me. And I have to think back to a family trip in 1975, in Grand Lake, Colorado. I took my parents' camera, I ran down to the lake and I shot a picture of a sailboat. But for me it's ironic that I am essentially doing something to fill my time, that I was hooked. So I was lucky. 

I got to work at Kansas State at this great newspaper, The Collegian. And then I got an internship at The Philadelphia Inquirer. So, I did a story about Greg Tutt, a boxer who trained in Joe Frazier's gym and worked really hard. I admired his dedication and his hard work. I remember the article really well. It ran in the Sunday magazine. It was written by a well-known writer, Steve Lopez. And the opening line of the story was Greg Tutt is walking through a neighborhood that's going nowhere and taking everybody with it. And, to me, you know I had to in a sense compete on the same page as people who could write like that. So, it was very important to me to work as hard as I could to deserve a place at that table. And working in Philadelphia led me to another amazing opportunity. 

I'd always wanted to work for Sports Illustrated. I'd done a lot of my college work in sports. A guy named Buzz Bissinger who was a writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer won a Pulitzer, and I had heard that he was leaving the newspaper to go do a book about high school football in Texas. And I went up and showed him the work and I said, you know “you should hire me to go do that work for you.” And it worked out. I moved to Odessa, Texas for a while and shot pictures for a book, Friday Night Lights, which is, you know, turned into the TV show and the movie and all these things. We were looking at race, at the boom-bust cycle of oil, parents living through their kids. This is the quarterback of the team, Mike Winchell who is always kind of a loner because of all the pressure on him. And this is still one of my favorite pictures. Not just from that book but you know I really enjoyed this picture. They had 5:30 AM call for football five days a week, double practices. They worked harder than most people do. And then they lost. They lost to Midland Lee, their archrivals, which for me, a lot of my sports photography I enjoy the winning and the losing photos. I like action pictures, but I was kind of always more drawn to the emotion in the pictures. But also there is a serious side to some of the work I was doing. 

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and I was getting ready to leave the country on the 12th for a trip to Thailand for... for a story for the magazine. And, you know, I got a call from my fiancée and she said, a plane hit the World Trade Center. And I looked at the building, and I could-- I actually had a view of that. So I ran to the roof of my building. I got to the roof at like, 8:58 or so. And, you know, I was just composing the picture with the smoke going downtown. These are... pictures I shot that ran in TIME magazine. I am very conflicted about these images but it is a very big part of my career. I'm glad that I did my job correctly. This horrible situation, it's a horrible thing to watch. But I do realize they're important pictures and I'm happy that I've done work that is now in history books. And... I had some pictures in a book about war photography and exhibited at the Corcoran, there's a film and there's a... military historian talking about my pictures and he said and I hadn't thought about it this way at all, he said that it's very rare that you have a picture of a war starting.

The Geographic was never far from my mind. This is the first picture I ever had published in the magazine from a story about La Salle, the French explorer. We worked on Patagonian dinosaur hunters. These are dinosaur footprints in Patagonia. And then the third story I did was more what you'd think as a National Geographic story. I skied around the Yukon Territory with scientists and we were studying nunataks which are the rocky regions that pop through the glaciers. And we were doing a survey of the animal life on that. The assignments started to come more frequently. One year I did six assignments. This is from a story in Ashkelon in Israel. This is a story from the Battle of Trafalgar. And... these are sea scouts that are looking at a painting on the wall behind me. This is the first digital photo I ever had in the magazine.

I worked on an impossible story to do. It was called... you know, ‘How Old Is It’. It was about how scientists date and age the universe. And I had a mathematician we talked to and he calculated that a three-day old baby is one-one hundred trillionth the age of the universe. So, my brother-in-law is a OB-GYN in New York he hooked me up with somebody who just had a baby. I shot it on the third day, flew to California, we were out in the desert and we're just trying to think of something that was illustrated that would make people stop and pay attention. I think my job quite often is the opposite of a writer. You know, it's... they want you tearing through their words and I want people to stop. I always want people to stop and just consider and pay attention to things.

This is from the Xinjiang Dynasty. These boys had collected river stones and were going off to build a wall. I remember this picture well because there's a building in the back and I was standing at that gas station in the back and I saw them drive by and it's like, “Oh, my gosh, that's such a good picture.” So, I took off running down the road. My driver was in the restroom, so I ran down the road and jumped on, after a quarter mile or so I jumped on the back of this tractor. And the guy driving the tractor didn't realize the kids didn't realize. And I'm sitting there and I get the camera up and I'm shooting pictures. I'm like, this is great, the light's really pretty. And I had four frames on my camera. So I was like, Argh! This was when I'm shooting film. So I just slowed down and made... I made four pretty good frames and it was one of those situations that I'm happy and lucky that I had this image. 

Worked on a story about Doggerland. A land bridge, during one of the Ice Ages between the continent and England. Where the tide-- when this goes out they can find footprints and artifacts. Some of these places are finding amazing burials. When things get covered up by silt and water and things like that that's actually-- people would think that's what destroys things but that keeps the microbes that are in the air away and things are more well preserved. 

I worked on a story on a tomb in Peru called Wari Tomb. We set there and you know they said, hey there might be something here, and they completely uncovered it in front of us and it was clutching that fabric. It was an amazing thing to see there's small tattoos on the wrist and this fits into a larger body of work that I'm doing. I photographed about 60 or 70 mummies.

3D printing. 3D printed gun. You know we were technically trying to figure out how to capture a bullet. And it's really complicated because the strobes have to be photographed at about one one-millionth of a second to capture a bullet coming out. And, you know, there's no strobe conventionally that can do that. You'd have to go to MIT, to the laboratory where 'Doc' Edgerton invented the strobe. So we were going to do the best we could and had these other strobes and he fired the gun this guy who 3D printed this gun and it exploded. So, the bullet was slowed down because the barrel exploded. So, this was the first picture I shot on that assignment. It was like, looking at it on digital, well, that works out pretty well. That, uhh... happy with that. I don't want to get near an exploding gun anyway, so.

And this was the most fun, doing this one. This is a scanning electronic microscope picture that I shot of shark skin, and you can see the shape of shark skin and they built a swimsuit based on that and it was... the fastest times in the world was set using that suit. Ultimately that suit was outlawed because they would throw it in the water and it would just float and you can't, you know, wear a floatation device they decided-- In the mean time I had an assistant, who was a college swimmer and he was like, we should get the fastest swimmer in the world to wear this. I'm like, “Yeah.” So, he goes, “Oh, it's Gary Hall, he's in Florida. I know where he swims.” So, he called and within half an hour Gary Hall had said “yes”. So, I was like, “Really?” So, then it was time to figure out how to do it. So we did a lot of testing, we got there and tested. Before... we were being delayed through thunderstorms and before Gary got in the water we were doing some testing. And this is me...swimming. I showed Gary the picture and I was trying to get you know, 'cause in my mind's eye it was like that, it was like-- you know, really svelte. I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I think you should keep your hips up.”

This is a chart of the Pythagorean Theorem of Light. I have no idea what it says. Or what it means. But I had the opportunity to work for a photographer who did know what it meant. And I learned more in about a month from him than I had learned in the entirety of my career.

This is a picture I did for a story about bog bodies and this is every picture I shot of this on this assignment. I think I made 87 lighting changes and there's 87 pictures. And then that's the one we ended up publishing. Generally, in my work, I kind of stop when I'm happy. You know, lighting a situation, so I kind of stop when I think it's gonna look as good as it's gonna look, so. These were hard mummies to photograph because they are, basically, shiny and black so, you had different choices on how you're gonna do it. This is one of the mummies. It's called the river of tar. And that's the location where some of the bog bodies were found. In the bogs they are finding all sorts of things. They are finding, you know, shoes, and that's a peat shovel. A peat bog shovel from about 2,500 years ago. Each of these has an individual story. This is a 14-year old female that they don't know why she was in the bogs. And this is the most famous, this is the Tollund man who had the leather noose around his neck and had a leather hat. You know everybody talks about his peaceful gaze and the tannin, the soil that he is in is the thing that has made their bodies so dark. It's like tanning a saddle. They absorb the chemistry and it's also what makes their hair red.

This brings me to really I think probably the most important story for me that I have ever worked on. Which was a story about Charles Darwin. The story was called “Was Darwin wrong?” And then in the magazine it said “No.” You know, 'cause essentially everything he said is true and correct. And, so we did this article on Darwin. And these are the birds that he collected in the Galapagos. And that's one of the privileges of being a Geographic photographer. You call up the British Museum and you know most of the time they'll say “Yes.” If you want to-- I want to see this or this and they'll let you do it, if you pay them. So these are birds that Darwin collected in the Galapagos which helped him found his theory because the beaks are different sizes even though they are the same species. This is essentially an example of island bio-evolution which for the story that we did for the magazine you know, everybody would have expected you to go to the Galapagos but Todd James, photo editor decided that we shouldn't and I agreed. But this was a really difficult story to work on. We were in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico shooting these different anoles which are the same species but have evolved separately and differently. We made comparative photos between gorilla hands and a human skeletal hand. This is a naked mole rat, which is an amazing story. 100 years before one was found Darwin predicted that there would be a mammal that had hive-like behavior. And in the horn of Africa they found these animals. This is a 26-year old individual. She's a queen and has bred thousands of offspring. And the interesting thing about this is that these stories always come back to where I learn something. or I reapply something I’ve learned. But the researcher on this told me that there is all this research going on about, you know how they don't get certain kinds of diseases. And the naked mole rats don't get cancer. So, this is going to be... it's holding good promise for research in different areas.

And this was actually Darwin's beetle collection which was great because that's how Darwin became interested in the natural world was because he was a beetle collector as a kid. Then we come to Alfred Russel Wallace. He's a naturalist, much younger than Darwin. He wasn't from a wealthy family like Darwin and he became a commercial Victorian collector who would go to different parts of the world and send back specimens for people. This is pre-television, pre-film, pre-magazines. So, people would have, you know, cassowaries stuffed in their parlor that they could talk about. So it was a form of just decoration and entertainment. He had an idea, he wrote Darwin a letter, and mailed it to him. Darwin gets this letter and then he doesn't do anything for two weeks. It's called Darwin's Pause. And, he's floored because Wallace has the same idea as him. Essentially the exact same idea that he has about the thing that makes evolution work is natural selection. So, he didn't do anything for two weeks, then he announces the Theory of Evolution via natural selection. And he, it's... the theory is by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin had been working on this for 25 years since he got off the Beagle and he may have not published it until he passed away because his family was religious. At least his wife's family was. But I think he was forced to publish because of Wallace's paper.

We also were able to go to a tuberculosis prison, a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis prison, where it was developed accidentally in Siberia. We used this in the story as an example of survival of the fittest, which is a really well-known concept of evolution. What happened was the authorities in this prison didn't use enough antibiotics. They used enough to contain it but the germs evolved and changed and became immune to the antibiotics. They've actually found traces of this kind of tuberculosis in Brighton Beach, in Long Island. You know, we were working on it like crazy. We had to get TB tests before we went and after we came back. This was a wonderful opportunity for me because it was a big story, I think it was 48 pages and it was just that the topic became so interesting to me that we travelled for 58 days to I think, 12 different countries and 26 different locations. And we were doing it on four-by-five film so it was a really challenging, challenging assignment. And it was three weeks before my wedding, so... Thank you very much.