After a photo shoot at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio for the National Geographic Photo Ark, a clouded leopard cub climbs on Joel Sartore’s head. The leopards, which live in Asian tropical forests, are illegally hunted for their spotted pelts.
A Coquerel’s sifaka, Propithecus coquereli, at the Houston Zoo.
Lincoln-based photographer Joel Sartore arranges his equipment for another National Geographic Photo Ark portrait session.
A veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus) at the Rolling Hills Zoo.
One of the April 2016 covers of National Geographic magazine featured an armadillo from the Lincoln Children’s Zoo.
In a publishing first for National Geographic magazine, the April 2016 issue had 10 different covers featuring the work of National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore. He photographed this peacock at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo.
California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus), the 1,000th species photographed in Phoenix, Ariz., by Joel Sartore, for his National Geographic Photo Ark project.
Joel Sartore had miles to go last week to meet an African clawless otter.
It was waiting for his cameras at a zoo in Virginia, but he’d just left Louisiana, where he photographed more than a dozen birds — including the black crake and red-crowned crane — at a private aviary.
And after Virginia, the National Geographic photographer was headed to an endangered turtle center in South Carolina. Next, four days in Florida, and more portrait sessions with an assortment of insects, birds, reptiles and small mammals, including a woolly opossum and a marsh rabbit.
He’ll be back in Lincoln by the end of the week to watch his daughter Ellen graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — but he won’t be home long.
After a few days, he’ll board a plane for Peru, to see the only South American short-eared dog in captivity. From there, the Arabian Peninsula. He’ll be Idaho in early October, for Snake River sockeye salmon, and Portland, Oregon, for a Bornean elephant.
And then, he said, he plans to come home to nap. For a month.
During an average year, a year not plagued by a pandemic, Sartore spends only about half of his nights in his own bed.
“I tell myself I won’t jam myself up with shoot after shoot,” he said last week from somewhere east of Shreveport, Louisiana. “But when someone says we have the last one, or the only one, in captivity that you’ll see in your lifetime, how can you say no to that?”
He can’t. So he’s followed his National Geographic Photo Ark project — his goal to single-handedly document the 20,000 or so species in captivity on Earth, to draw attention to their value and their fragility — around the world, to nearly every U.S. sanctuary and zoo so far, and to 50 countries.
And he’s only a little more than halfway done.
But when he started all of this 15 years ago this week, Sartore saw it as a simple way to stay closer to home.
Joel Sartore shoots an animal’s portrait for his Photo Ark series.
‘I didn’t want to sit around the house’
In the summer of 2006, John Chapo, president and CEO of the Lincoln Children’s Zoo, answered his phone. It was Joel Sartore, and he needed to come talk to him.
“He said, ‘Chapo, I’m not going anywhere for a long time but I need to use my creative juices. I’ve always thought about doing portraits of animals. Can we do it here?’”
“I said, ‘Well, have you done this before?’”
“He said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot.’”
Sartore had made his living traveling the world for National Geographic. But that year, as his wife Kathy was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, he needed to stay home.
“I didn’t want to sit around the house all the time,” Sartore said. “John Chapo just kind of humored me.”
Sartore had taken plenty of pictures of animals in the wild, but he wanted to try something new — crisp portraits against stark black or white backdrops.
The absence of context, the lack of a natural setting, levels the playing field, he said, giving a mouse the same stature as an elephant. And the intimacy — the eye contact — helps humans see something deeper in another species.
“My hope is that people see some portrait of a monkey or a pheasant and they can look into those eyes and see there’s great beauty there, and intelligence, and that these animals have a right to exist.”
But that goal would come later. In August 2006, Sartore was just trying to stay busy.
That first day, he photographed a buck-toothed naked mole rat against a bright-white countertop in the zoo’s kitchen.
A naked mole rat photographed at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo 15 years ago is the the first image in what became the National Geographic Photo Ark.
And that first day started something. Sartore returned again and again, ultimately photographing almost all of the Lincoln zoo’s species, maybe 70 to 80 in all, Chapo said.
“We just started working together very cautiously, very safely, with the animals, and we kept moving forward,” Chapo said. “So many of our animals are engageable animals, it was easy to start the Photo Ark at the zoo.”
As Sartore’s wife recovered, he started making trips beyond 27th and A streets, photographing species within a day’s drive — Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, Denver, Rapid City’s Reptile Gardens.
In the beginning, he paid out of pocket for the project. He didn’t have grant funding and, when he returned to work, he didn’t yet have the formal backing of National Geographic — though he did have an editor who pitched pieces that allowed him to double dip.
“She would send me on assignments that were hybrids. I could shoot animals in the wild and also get my studio portraits, too.”
Also in the beginning, he didn’t call it the Photo Ark.
He called it the Biodiversity Project.
“My wife said, ‘Nobody’s going to remember that.’ I said, ‘No, I think it’s good.’ But then I was being interviewed on live TV, and I forgot it.”
An endangered Malayan tiger, Panthera tigris jacksoni, at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo.
An audience of a ‘gazillion’
With a new name, the Photo Ark caught on.
A decade after Chapo let Sartore take that first photo, the two were on the set of NBC’s “Today Show,” along with a tarantula, a large tegu lizard, Fez the Armadillo and Johnny the Serval, an African wild cat.
They went on the air after Shirley MacLaine, Chapo remembered. “Seal was running late, so we got his slot. And his slot got shrunk because we were doing so great they loved our segment and gave us more time.”
That same year, Fez the Armadillo and a peacock from Lincoln made the covers of National Geographic. Zoo animals from Lincoln would also be projected on walls of the Vatican, The Hague and the United Nations headquarters.
Lincoln had helped launch the Photo Ark, and the Photo Ark was paying it back.
Early on, Sartore told Chapo he could use photos he took at the zoo. “And for a National Geographic photographer to say, ‘You get to use the photos I take for free,’ it’s like, really? It’s like hallelujah. Before that, it was me with my simple little camera,” the zoo CEO said.
And as the project’s reach grew each year, Chapo appreciated the role his zoo played in its beginnings. A movement, a cause, had started with a naked mole rat on a kitchen countertop in Lincoln.
“I’m very proud of the fact the zoo launched this exceptional project, because it has touched tens of millions of lives.”
He’s not exaggerating. A few years after Sartore started the Photo Ark, National Geographic was firmly behind it, flexing its media muscle to publicize the project.
Every time it posts a Photo Ark animal, its 525 million followers see it across several social media platforms. The Photo Ark has inspired three multi-part television series, one on PBS and two on Nat Geo Wild. Sartore and his work have appeared on “60 Minutes,” “Access Hollywood,” NPR’s “Fresh Air” and more.
National Geographic has already published four Photo Ark books, with two more on the way. An estimated 6.5 million people have toured the traveling Photo Ark exhibit, its most popular ever, said Colby Bishop, senior director of wildlife programs for the National Geographic Society.
National Geographic has also built a free Photo Ark curriculum for educators, launched a fellowship program for early career conservationists in Latin America, Asia and Africa working to protect the species Sartore has photographed, and orchestrated a nationwide billboard campaign.
Sartore and his family were standing in the middle of New York’s Times Square the moment almost all of its electronic billboards switched to Photo Ark images, Bishop said.
A federally threatened koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, with her babies at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.
She couldn’t estimate the total number of people exposed to Sartore’s photos in the past 15 years.
“I could say gazillions. Since the goal is to get this in front of as many people as possible, that’s what we do.”
Minimizing harm, racing the clock
Late last week, the man who started this movement was 2 feet from the venomous fangs of a canebrake rattlesnake, waiting for the right moment to squeeze the shutter.
Sartore has photographed more than 11,000 species in captivity, and has 10,000 or so more to go, but insists on taking all of the pictures himself.
“If we try crowdsourcing, we’d end up with animals that would be harmed. We’re really careful about not stressing animals. We pride ourselves on not doing any harm.”
He tries hard to limit his impact on the animals. He keeps each photo shoot to a matter of minutes, minimizes talking, doesn’t use his camera’s auto drive.
But he knows the clock is ticking. He was 44 when he started what became the Photo Ark; he’s 59 now. He has another 10 to 15 years of work left. “Hopefully, I can finish this thing before I die of old age.”
Lincoln-based photographer Joel Sartore during a National Geographic Photo Ark portrait session.
He was nearly grounded last year, when the pandemic’s travel bans threatened to delay his progress. Then he stepped outside his house on Sheridan Boulevard one night early last summer.
He noticed all of the insects drawn to his porch light. He started experimenting with other bulbs. Halogen. Sodium. Mercury vapor. He directed the beams to white sheets, collected the insects, took their portraits and released them.
But he didn’t know what they were. He’d heard of a Bellevue couple, Loren and Babs Padelford, who could identify insects, so he knocked on their door, a Photo Ark book in hand as a gift and a request for help.
“They said, ‘That sounds interesting.’ I said, ‘I don’t think you understand. You know what happens when you swim out to a drowning man? He climbs on top of you and drowns you, too. I’m going to send you insects seven days a week.”
A pygmy slow loris, Nycticebus pygmaeus, at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium.
The amateur entomologists got sucked in, identifying the photos Sartore was sending them. They accompanied him on mothing trips to state parks in Nebraska and neighboring states, where Sartore would fire up a generator, illuminate a light, hang up a sheet and collect new species.
By the end of the year, the couple had identified more than 700 distinct species of insects for Sartore and the Photo Ark.
And they were happy to, Loren Padelford said.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into when we said, ‘Yeah, we’ll help you.’ We had no idea it would turn out to be what it did.”
Their role was important, Sartore said.
Even the smallest species — the obscure insects drawn to his porch light on a summer night in Lincoln — are crucial, and deserve to be seen.
Joel Sartore collects endemic insects to photograph near Deerwood, Minn.
They need clean air, clean water and a stable climate, he said.
And so does the human species.
“How we treat all these lesser species will really determine whether people survive in the long term. All these things these other species need to survive, we need those things, too. It’s at our own peril we ignore the natural world.”
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Veiled chameleon
A veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus) at the Rolling Hills Zoo.
Sartore with owl
National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore is seen with one of his banner prints of a spotted owl displayed in Morrill Hall on the UNL Campus in 2004.
Clouded leopard
A clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) at the Houston Zoo. This species is listed as federally endangered. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Blue poison dart frog
A Blue poison dart frog (Dendrobates azureus) at Reptile Gardens. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Joel Sartore
Joel Sartore is a longtime National Geographic photographer who lives in Lincoln.
Pygmy marmoset
Pygmy marmoset at Lincoln Children’s Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Fiat Lux show
Joel Sartore photographed these four coyote puppies at Nebraska Wildlife Rehab in Louisville. The image, part of Sartore’s Photo Ark series, was one of many by several National Geographic photographers that was projected upon the walls of St. Peter’s Basilica Dec. 8, 2015. The project, “Fiat Lux: Illuminating Our Common Home,” was designed to highlight the plights of animals and bring attention to the Paris climate talks.
Red wolf
A critically endangered red wolf (Canis rufus gregoryi) at the Great Plains Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Photo Ark
The Florida panther (puma concolor coryi) is endangered.
Bald eagle
A bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) named Bensar at the George M. Sutton Avian Research Center. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Lewis-Syford House
Joel Sartore of Lincoln pauses in the middle of a 12-hour workday in 2013 as he worked on the hardwood floor of the Lewis-Syford House, which he and his family were renovating. Built in 1878, the French Second Empire-style house on the 700 block of North 16th Street was being prepared for his eldest son, Cole, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
African elephant
A female African elephant (Loxodonta africana) at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Dog images on soundproofing panels
These dog images are on soundproofing panels in the Pieloch center’s kennel areas in Lincoln’s Capital Humane Society. A few years ago Joel Sartore photographed the dogs, which were in the Park Boulevard facility’s adoption program.
Giant panda
A giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) at Zoo Atlanta. This endangered species is native to China. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Debit card art
Photographer Joel Sartore is one of the three artists whose images appear on new Union Bank & Trust debit cards. This image captured by Sartore is of a curl-crested aracari, part of the toucan family.
Ocelot
Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) at the Omaha Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Joel Sartore caricature
This caricature of Joel Sartore was done by Jim Horan, who has drawn all but two of the Omaha Press Club’s 136 Faces on the Barroom Floor.
Kathy and Joel Sartore
Breast cancer survivor Kathy Sartore and husband Joel Sartore, National Geographic photographer, in 2012 stand in front of a gray wolf image he photographed for National Geographic.
Asian lady beetle
Asian lady beetle (Harmonia axyridis). (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Morrill Hall banners
Joel Sartore (right), a National Geographic photographer, and Charles DeVries of SignCo install a banner in between the pillars of Morrill Hall where an exhibit of Sartore’s images was displayed in 2004.
Monarch butterflies
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) from the Sierra Chincua mountain range, Mexico. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Sartore NBC
Joel Sartore and Anne Thompson of NBC Nightly News prepare to photograph a West African dwarf crocodile at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in 2012. Sartore was taking images of the 6,000 species in U.S. zoos. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Penstemon
The federally endangered blowout penstemon (Penstemon haydenii), raised by Jim Stubbendieck, who helped bring the plant back from the brink of extinction.
Sartore family
Joel Sartore poses with his wife Kathy and three kids, (from left) Spencer, Ellen and Cole and dog, Muldoon, at their home in Lincoln, Jan. 25, 2009.
Grey gibbons
Grey gibbons (Hylobates muelleri muelleri) at the Miller Park Zoo. This species is listed as endangered. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Sartore flag
Joel Sartore cleans the rain gutter over his front door in late June 2007 after hanging a large American flag.
Salt Creek tiger beetle
The Salt Creek tiger beetle (Cicindela nevadica lincolniana) in a lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Morrill Hall banners
National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore (top) gets help from Charles DeVries of SignCO with installing one of two large banners in between the pillars of Morrill Hall to promote an exhibit of Sartore’s photography and to raise funds and memberships for the museum on the UNL Campus in 2004.
Two-toed sloth
A Linne’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Sartore presentation
Joel Sartore, Lincoln resident and National Geographic photographer, made a presentation on endangered species at Lincoln East in 1999.
Minnows
Minnows over the Powder River in Wyoming, an ecosystem threatened by coal bed methane development.
Joel Sartore shares with the audience
Joel Sartore shares with a 2012 Lincoln audience his photography from travels around the world and how his wife’s breast cancer has impacted him and his family.
Reimann’s snake-necked turtle
Reimann’s snake-necked turtle (Chelodina reimanni). (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Photo banners
National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore views three photo banners of a bison and calf, a puffy prairie dog and tallgrass prairie with walking sticks that were to be displayed in Sartore’s exhibit in Morrill Hall in 2004.
Humboldt penguins
Humboldt penguins off the Chilean coast.
Lewis-Syford House
A family portrait of (from left) Cole, Joel, Kathy and Spencer Sartore framed in the second-story window of the Lewis-Syford House, which the family was renovating in 2013.
Mandrill
A captive, 5-month-old mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Ivory-billed woodpecker
Ivory-billed woodpecker, University of Nebraska State Museum.
Photo Ark
Joel Sartore’s “Photo Ark: A World Worth Saving” is a 60-page softcover book featuring Sartore’s photos of animals.
Sartore founded The Photo Ark, his multiyear documentary project to save species and habitat, which has included having his photos projected on New York City skyscrapers. All of us can share in Sartore’s passion through the products he’s made available. They include his book “Photo Ark: A World Worth Saving” ($9.95) — signed copies are available through the website — as well as daily and wall calendars ($14.95 each).
Black-Tailed Prairie Dog, Montana, 1995
Small as it is, few species are as controversial as the prairie dog. Joel Sartore photographed this one in Montana in 1995. Photo by Joel Sartore/joelsartore.com
Cheetah
Hasari, a 3-year-old cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), at White Oak Conservation Center. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Banners
National Geographic photographer and Nebraska native Joel Sartore (right) and Joel Neilson stand on ladders in 2004 to make a fit for a large photo banner of a bison and calf that was featured in Sartore’s exhibit at Morrill Hall.
Coquerel’s sifaka
An endangered Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus coquereli). (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Turkey vulture
A portrait of a turkey vulture. (Courtesy Joel Sartore/joelsartore.com)
Porcupine
Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) at the Great Plains Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Okapi
A male okapi (Okapia johnstoni), at White Oak Conservation Center. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Spectacled owl
A spectacled owl (Pulsatrix perspicillata). (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Eastern bongo
A male eastern bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci) at the Great Plains Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Amur leopard
Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) named Usi from the Omaha Zoo. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Snowy owl
A young female snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) at Raptor Recovery Nebraska. (JOEL SARTORE/Copyright www.joelsartore.com)
Reach the writer at 402-473-7254 or [email protected]
On Twitter @LJSPeterSalter