Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2013 i National Geographic Magazine

Readers of National Geographic’s first issue can be forgiven for not being thoroughly captivated. The magazine that debuted in 1888 was a drab scientific publication of 98 pages wrapped in a plain brown cover. Several meteorological maps broke up the drone of black-and-white print. Articles included “The Classification of Geographic Forms by Genesis” and “The Survey of the Coast.” And that’s how it pretty much remained for 16 years, until 1904, when the magazine’s printer told Editor Gilbert H. Grosvenor that he had 11 pages to fill. Grosvenor grabbed a package from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society containing some of the first photographs of Lhasa, Tibet, which was then considered one of the world’s most exotic places. He selected 11 and sent them to the printer, certain he would be…

In 2011 we were in Mexico shooting a 360-degree composite photo in the Hoyo Negro cenote, a deep sinkhole that has filled with groundwater. There were human remains inside—more than 9,000 years old, among the oldest in the Americas. It was a forbidding dive; the government had put up a sign outside the caves that said, If you go past this point, you will likely die. We had tested our camera system in a scuba pool, but that was ten feet of water. Now we were diving up to 200 feet deep. It was dark down there, so we took a SunSphere, a beach ball–size glass sphere full of batteries and LEDs. The plan was to tether the SunSphere and let it float above to light the whole cave. When…

“Bring Along a Brownie,” the ad copy read, and in 1900, the year of its introduction, 150,000 people did. By 1907 more than a million had been sold. Named the Brownie after characters in a series of 19th-century children’s books, the easy-to-use camera was the brainchild of George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. It originally sold for a dollar and put photography within the reach of everyone — including Ansel Adams, whose first camera, a Brownie, was presented to him by his parents on a family trip to Yosemite. Until its demise in 1970 it was the camera of memories, used to take pictures of weddings, high school graduations, pets, babies, birthday parties, Halloween trick-or-treaters, and countless Kodak moments. Before the Brownie, photography was an elite, expensive pursuit.…

Photographer Ian Ruhter ditched his digital camera three years ago when he discovered the 19th-century photography of Eadweard Muybridge. Ruhter—who once covered action sports—was first drawn to Muybridge’s stop-motion frames but was ultimately hooked by the handson technique used to create them. Known as wet-plate collodion, the process involves pouring a liquid mixture of iodides, bromides, and a solution called collodion over a glass or aluminum plate, which is then bathed in silver nitrate to make it light sensitive. The plate must be exposed and developed quickly, before the collodion dries and loses sensitivity. Ruhter’s images (like this one, left, of skateboarder Levi Brown) benefit from modern studio lighting. Still, for him, making wet plates is about embracing the past. The old-school art form is catching on with others too,…

Glaciers are wild beasts. Back in our preindustrial days we feared them like wolves —except glaciers ate whole villages. By the late 19th century they’d become tourist attractions; in Switzerland you could venture into the belly of the Rhône Glacier through a tunnel dug each summer next to the Hotel Belvedere. By then we had also begun creating a world that may one day have no room for glaciers. But for now, beasts they remain. They breathe. Snow stacks up to become ice in the upper altitudes of a glacier; it melts down near the snout. “The glacier breathes in in winter, then breathes out in summer,” says Matthias Huss, a young glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In August a quarter of the water flowing in the…

Since 1991 I’ve been obsessed with making pictures from hotel rooms that I’ve converted into camera obscuras. A few years ago I went to West Texas and had this fantasy of photographing the desert the same way, but of course there are no rooms in the desert. So I used a tent. The tent became a way to see the surrounding landscape projected directly onto the ground itself. I got excited about the idea that this could be a way to celebrate all the iconic places in the West—places that are hard to see in a fresh way because they’ve been photographed a billion times. I mean, how many pictures of Old Faithful are there? But with this way of making pictures, I felt like I could give these incredibly…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON TV Nat Geo Photographers To get just the right shot of Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (left), Carsten Peter rappelled into its fiery interior. Tune in this month as the National Geographic Channel celebrates this magazine’s legendary photographers and the risks they’ve been taking for over a hundred years to document the world and all that is in it. TRIP NEW SHIP Orion (left), the latest addition to the National Geographic fleet, is setting sail for the Pacific. Choose your voyage and book your cabin aboard the 102-passenger ship at ngexpeditions.com/newship. WORKSHOP PHOTO WORKSHOPS Hone your skills with Geographic contributor Jay Dickman during a week of assignments, talks, and editing sessions in Wyoming’s cowboy country (right). Find workshops elsewhere in the U.S. and…

Emperor of the Image He didn’t speak, he growled in a low-level rumble like the sound of distant thunder or the scrape of boots over gravel. For many, his was the voice of God, a stature reinforced by the needlepoint panel that hung above his office door. “Wipe your knees before entering,” it said. Despite the kneeling bench beside his desk (a photographer’s not entirely facetious gift), Robert Emanuel Gilka, who died on June 25 at the age of 96, was anything but lordly. He was modest, with a single-minded focus on the craft of photojournalism. Over the course of a 27-year career at National Geographic—22 of them as director of photography—he set the standard for the magazine’s visual excellence. He was adored and feared by his photographers. The fear…

Dog Days In 2011 I set out to do a photo project, traveling to every state in America to tell the stories of everyday folks, every single day for a year. Before I left, I realized I needed a dog for my adventures. I knew I wanted a coonhound, and found Maddie in an Atlanta, Georgia, shelter, but I still wasn’t sure. As I walked her back to her kennel, though, she pressed her body against me the whole time. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I can’t put you back in the cage. So $40 later, I’d rescued this dog I’d just met. Since then Maddie’s been with me 24/7, next to me in the front seat of my truck, getting noseprints on the windows. It was during that…

Every photo counts at National Geographic—so we counted every photo taken for the magazine last year, published or not. We also dived into our photographic division’s travel records to see who went where during 2012. Places visited include Afghanistan, Albania, Antarctica, Australia, Bahamas, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gaza Strip, Georgia, Germany, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Laos, Libya, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Yemen.…

Thirty-four years before the birth of this magazine, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard sourly prophesied a banal fate for the newly popularized art of photography. “With the daguerreotype,” he observed, “everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent—and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait.” Thirty-four years before the birth of this magazine, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard sourly prophesied a banal fate for the newly popularized art of photography. “With the daguerreotype,” he observed, “everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent—and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall…

I love the intimacy of a close-up portrait because it captures the essence of a person: It’s not about their clothes or their environment—there are no hints of social status. Everything is summed up in the face. I may take 40, 50, 100 pictures of a person, and the one I like best is when the face hasn’t caught on to the next expression the brain wants it to make. I like building catalogs of faces that invite people to compare them. We have an idea of what the human eye—or the nose or the lip—is supposed to look like. But when you compare 10, 20, 100 sets of eyes, you see how different they are. I take pictures of people from such varied backgrounds and cultures and ethnicities, but…

Half of all the species on Earth could be headed irreversibly toward extinction by 2100. Not if I can help it. That’s the idea behind the Photo Ark: getting the public to look these creatures in the eye, then care enough to save them while there’s still time. My goal is to photograph as many of the world’s captive species as I can before time runs out. I’m at about 3,000 now, and just getting started. I work mostly at zoos and aquariums, today’s keepers of the kingdom. Many species would already be gone without their heroic captive-breeding efforts. Studio-style portraits on black or white backgrounds level the playing field: A tortoise counts as much as a rhino. The power of photography is that you literally freeze time with it.…

The child’s name is Innocent. To photographer Bleasdale, she symbolizes the tragedy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An orphan, she died of diarrhea, a treatable condition. And it’s not as if the DRC lacks resources. The country is rich in minerals, mined for use in electronic devices and fought over by armed groups. Miners often die on the job—that’s how Innocent lost her father. Bleasdale’s years of covering Congo have brought him to too many child funerals—and inspired him to raise money for the St. Kizito orphanage, where Innocent died. —Daniel Stone BEHIND THE LENS How dangerous is your work in the Congo? MB: There are always challenges working in a situation like that. It wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan, but it was still a rebel war run by…

How to Fix Everest “The mountain is so high and so indifferent it calls upon every climber, at one time or another, to rise to his or her better self,” reads your article. I might believe Everest climbers had a better self if, with their iron wills and monetary advantages, they also figured out how to remove their detritus and the bodies of their fallen comrades. Where is there a better self in evidence when people reach a self-interested goal but take no care of the environment they are traversing? JOANNE PAYLING Livermore, California I often fantasized about climbing Mount Everest and reaching the highest point on Earth. After reading your article, I will take that dream off my bucket list. A two-hour wait at the Hillary Step, 234 people…

“The number one thing parents want to see is if babies have ten fingers and ten toes,” says engineer Karl-Heinz Lumpi. His team developed software that shows the digits in full-color 3-D. Beyond allaying parents’ curiosity, the more exact image of what’s going on in the womb may play a role in diagnostics. Doctors who were formerly resigned to a blurred heartbeat can now see inside that organ’s chambers. It’s all in the lighting. The image starts out like a traditional 3-D ultrasound’s. Then a computer program adds virtual illumination, mimicking how light plays across human skin—reflecting, casting shadows, and giving shape. As in regular photography, the light source is movable. Plus the image is rotatable, so wriggling fingers, or a floating umbilical cord like this eight-month fetus’s, likely won’t…

15 photographers, 8 questions We asked 15 National Geographic photographers (named below) a few questions about their careers— and all of the travel that makes those careers possible. How many stories have you shot for National Geographic? 􀂅 How many countries have you visited during your career? • What was your longest assignment ever? • How many cameras do you own? • What nonphotographic item do you always take when you travel? • What’s the first thing you do when you get home? • How old were you when you decided to be a photographer? • What is the heaviest baggage you ever checked?…

When I first went to the Congo, I realized that a hundred years after Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, nothing had changed. People were still being exploited, only now it was multinational corporations sucking up all the resources. A report in 2004 said that more than four million people had died in what is now called Africa’s first world war, and I just couldn’t believe that no one was talking about this horrific death toll. That enraged me. At one point I was spending eight months a year photographing this war, and yet only a couple of international reporters were covering it from Kinshasa. So I keep bringing back these images because I want to make people as angry as I am. I want them to know the minerals in…

I’ve covered global stories where foreign photographers are everywhere. But in North Korea I’m usually the only one. So I feel this responsibility, that if I don’t take a certain picture, it won’t be seen at all. For decades the only pictures we had of the country were propaganda images. So most people think of North Korea as a cardboard facade, where everything is staged and nothing is real. When I first visited in 2000, that’s how I saw it too. But since the Associated Press opened a bureau in Pyongyang in 2012, I’ve visited the country 25 times and taken thousands of images behind the facade. Let me be clear: I’m not allowed to travel freely. I can’t photograph nuclear reactors or prison camps. But my work is not…

Shutter speeds, f-stops, film speeds, ISOs: Aspiring photographers used to have to master the mechanics of a camera before they could hope to create an arresting image. Today, with the explosion of camera apps on our smartphones, we’re all photographers, and pretty good ones at that, since the quality of smartphone images now rivals that of digital cameras. The new ease of photography has unleashed a seemingly insatiable appetite for capturing the magical and the mundane. We are documenting everyday moments with manic intensity, whether it’s an image of our breakfast, our cat—or the cat’s breakfast. And rather than collect pictures in scrapbooks, we share and like and comment on them with friends and strangers around the globe. Even photojournalists are experimenting with mobile phones because their virtual invisibility makes…

Pioneers of modern dance Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn pose for photographer Franklin Price Knott in this Autochrome—an early color photo process— from the April 1916 Geographic. The dance pictured, the “Garden of Kama,” was one of many India-influenced works by the pair, who married in 1914. Their Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles, California, counted choreographer Martha Graham and silent film actress Louise Brooks as alumnae Knott must have liked the couple: Two images of them appear in his portfolio of Autochromes in that issue. His other colorful subjects include a cowboy, pumpkins, and tigers in a New York zoo. Today National Geographic’s archive maintains nearly 15,000 glass-plate Autochromes, one of the largest such collections in the world.…