7 extraordinary photographers share the stories behind their most iconic images

What kind of person chases a tornado, or dives among sharks, or travels into a conflict zone, all for a photograph? Jimmy Chin—mountain climber, skier, photographer, filmmaker—wondered this as a child growing up in Minnesota, flipping through the pages of his family’s copies of National Geographic. When he picked up photography in his twenties, his goal was to shoot for the magazine.

Joining the ranks of National Geographic photographers in 2002, he has since shown how far—or high—he’ll go for a picture. As his friend and fellow climber Alex Honnold attempted a ropeless ascent of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park in 2017, Chin dangled from a safety line nearby, more than 2,000 feet above the valley floor. Honnold’s death-defying feat also became the Oscar-winning National Geographic documentary Free Solo, directed by Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, his wife and creative partner.

(How they filmed Alex Honnold’s death-defying Free Solo.)

For a new series, the two National Geographic Explorers turned the camera on photographers. In March they debuted Photographer, six episodes that embed viewers with “some of the world’s most extraordinary visual storytellers,” as Chin describes them. “We’ve always been interested in stories about people who are pushing the edges of the human experience.” Doing something that’s never been done, or capturing an image that’s never been seen, arises from the “same instinct,” he explains.

Follow these and other story-tellers in the National Geographic series Photographer, streaming March 19 on Disney+ and Hulu.

Dedication to craft unites the show’s featured photographers. From the tiniest animals to a final flight into space, the following images sample their work and the stories behind them.

Krystle Wright

Imperial, Nebraska

It’s a tough thing to see because you feel this contradiction.  On one hand it’s just like, Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m witnessing this absolute phenomenon. But then at the same time, particularly when it’s going through a town, you realize, Well, this is absolutely destroying lives.

Photographer Krystle Wright and fellow storm chasers arrived on the scene just as  a supercell storm spitting lightning threatened a farm with a UFO-like “mother ship” formation in May 2019. The team’s timing that day was “sheer luck,” Wright recalls. After retreating from a storm in Colorado that pounded their SUV with hail, they crossed into Nebraska and caught up to this system at the apex of its power.

(How Wright got the photo of her dreams.)

Photograph by Anand Varma

Anand Varma

Montréal, Quebec

National Geographic Explorer Anand Varma took thousands of frames of a ladybug clutching a braconid wasp’s cocoon for the cover of the November 2014 issue. The wasp larva developed inside the spotted lady beetle; just before the wasp emerged to spin a cocoon, it paralyzed its host. Something in the process made the ladybug twitch like a zombie. Readers wrote to Varma confessing that they used to dislike insects but his picture had opened their eyes. Or, as Varma puts it, “I used to think bugs were gross, but now I think they’re cool.”

(How to take photos of the world’s tiny creatures, according to Varma.)

Muhammed Muheisen 

Al Mafraq, Jordan

If you want to be able to capture the right emotion, to capture the image, you have to respect the  people and you have to gain their trust. It’s not something you buy or you sell. It’s something you invest. It’s a long-term investment. 

Zahra Mahmoud, photographed here at age seven in 2018, lives in a tent in Jordan. Muhammed Muheisen, a National Geographic Explorer who documents refugee crises, met Zahra and her family in 2015, soon after they fled the war in their native Syria. Every year he visits them at the encampment and photographs Zahra, now a teenager. Muheisen says he’ll continue telling the family’s story until they’re in a more permanent living situation.

(Muheisen tells the story of animals trapped in war zones finding a second chance.)

Photograph by Campbell Addy

Campbell Addy

London, England/U.K.

This image represents a time in my career and life where I was truly questioning my purpose and direction. … I felt that I had lost ‘me’ in the work. So, to reboot my creative mainframe, I went back to the beginning. I went back to me.

Campbell Addy’s fashion and portrait photography explores identity through boldly stylized depictions of diverse, often Black, faces and bodies. As part of an exhibition in 2023, Addy moved in front of the camera for a series of self-portraits, including this one, where he wears blackface—a motif in his work—and his hair intentionally evokes the strange rabbit in the cult classic film Donnie Darko. The photographer wanted to remind himself to stay artistically brave.

(Learn how to take perfect portrait photos.)

Cristina Mittermeier 

Galápagos Islands

[Photography is] a very challenging job, to be gone all the time, months on end, to be so engaged in something that’s pretty isolating. To be a photographer, you’re a lone wolf. So when Paul and I met and we started working together, it was almost like finding your life jacket in the middle of the ocean.

In 2021 photographer Cristina Mittermeier and her partner, Paul Nicklen—both National Geographic Explorers— were diving together in the Galápagos Islands to promote the expansion of a protected marine reserve. As an ocean current pulled Mittermeier toward a reef and a large shark patrolled the area, she focused on the scene above her: a school of brightly colored cardinalfish darting from the path of a Galápagos sea lion.

Paul Nicklen 

Nunavut Territory, Northern Canada

As Arctic sea ice disappears, hungry polar bears are increasingly forced to hunt seals in open water. In 2004 Nicklen photographed a male swimming beneath a floating piece of ice, its image reflected on the water’s surface. To get the angle, Nicklen leaned far over the side of the small boat from which he was observing the bear and dunked his camera underwater. 

(How Nicklen captured a healthy ecosystem.)

Photograph by Dan Winters

Dan Winters

Kennedy Space Center, Florida

My primary work is portrait work. But the other stuff is just really my passion. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with NASA in an official capacity, which is kind of amazing. I don’t think I would’ve imagined as a kid working with NASA. 

On May 16, 2011, the space shuttle Endeavour blasted through clouds for the final mission of its 19-year career. The day before the launch—the craft’s 25th— Dan Winters positioned sound-triggered cameras around the launchpad. He manually operated another camera, which he used to make this image, lowering its exposure level to create a darker, more dramatic scene. When the rocket boosters roared, the cameras clicked.

(Discover our top picks for pictures in 2023, including Winters’s work.)

A version of this story appears in the April 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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