Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez: New book from the National Geographic Image Collection

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Photo Book from National Geographic Focal Point Press ($30 order it here )

A Quick Look by April Alvarez

When she first started making the case for stepping up the conservation of the photography and art collection at National Geographic, you would have thought Director Maura Mulvihill was asking to house her personal shoe collection. No one with their fingers on the purse strings was interested in spending the money. Cardboard boxes full of glass plates languished. Black and white prints were in giant file cabinets in the warehouse. But she persisted, until today when a state of the art preservation system holds one of the most extensive, and still, astonishing collections of images in the world.

Disclosure: I worked in Image Collection for ten years. Stephen has worked as a National Geographic photographer since 1995 and is represented by Image Collection. It is really pleasing to see Stephen’s photographs published in the Exploration section of this book. As NGM Editor Chris Johns once said after Stephen presented an expedition proposal for consideration, “Well, it is what we do.”

Stephen has always said that when he is making a picture, he wants not only to show what it looks like in a place, but what it FEELS like to be there. That is the National Geographic difference, what sets apart a really successful image from thousands of others. A sense of that no matter how far-flung or remote or dangerous, whether access was given by a formal permit, the tacit acceptance by a community, or the sheer virtue of being there, that the photographer has made a connection.

Early in the book , a black and white image from the 1890s on pp. 36-7 shows “Early mountaineering in the alps” and this sense of connection is very real though the picture is well over 100 years old. Two climbers. What kind of equipment could they have been using? What are their coats and boots made from? Look at that incredible vista – and that’s just showing them getting there, it’s not even the top. It looks misty – is there a storm? And Ho. Ly. Moly. If the mountain climbers are there, against that part of the wall, and that huge boulder is there, where is the photographer standing? And that’s always the question. Where is the photographer?

The Image Collection Book divides the photographs from the collection into 4 themes: Exploration; Wildlife; People and Culture; and Science and Climate Change.

Each section is divided by historical periods, giving a photographic view of changes not only in technology, but also in culture, and not only of the culture of the photographed, but the culture of the people taking pictures.

Photographer Charles Martin’s first underwater color picture. I recall pulling out the glass plates from this story to index them and thinking, you are so kidding me. This is the first set of color pictures taken with a camera underwater? How cool is my job? And now we have photographer Brian Skerry diving with whale sharks. How cool is his job? It’s similar to NPR blogger Claire O’Neill’s note about Stephen’s Iron Hoop cave picture: that a predecessor photographed an eerily similar cave room in Carlsbad in 1924. (And hey cavers, there’s even a Norbert Casteret picture on p. 59 of ice falls underground in Spain!)

It goes on and on. Polar bears swimming. Space missions. Vestiges of conflict, the cold war. Machu Picchu. Paris. Kentucky. Tibet. Stereotypes. Surprises. What is it that one of the Grosvenors said, the world and all that’s in it? There are 400 images, 204 photographers, 120 years. How can this book not fascinate?

Michelle Delaney, the Photographic Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History opens the book with an essay on the historical perspective of the collection, one wrought with a Washingtonian’s knowledge of the great repositories of American, and indeed, global endeavor. Props to Michelle for telling the story of NG Photographer Kurt Wentze l, one of the Society’s great “men in the field” last century (typical assignment: Do India. No story meeting. No budget. No conference calls. No rescheduled conference calls. No writer.* Do India.) Kurt loved every picture in the collection as if it were his own and was a non-stop advocate for better storage. His acolyte Conservationist Robin Siegel was able to continue his work and spent many a day conserving one piece of the collection at a time.

The book closes with a collection profile, photographer and artist bios, and a wonderful interview with Image Collection Director, Maura Mulvihill, the woman responsible for the modernization of the collection and the accessibility of its 11.5 MILLION images to the public. I could have used an index at this juncture. I want to know on which pages I’ll find Luis Marden’s pictures.

In short, the book is packed with gorgeous images, the stunning, the subtle, the jaw dropping, the thoughtful, the mortifying. The wish I was there, the oh, glad I’m not there. I should write more about the pictures, but they are all in the book, to be viewed. The truly remarkable thing is that the collection has been preserved so well, the collection continues to grow, and National Geographic can publish a book like this every year for a very long time.

The National Geographic Image Collection Book is a homecoming for me, each picture bringing to mind dozens of others that relate in subject or theme or style, or even better, reminding me of the souls who venture out, as my friend photographer Stuart Franklin once compared it, far away from the safety of their lives under the fruit trees and who return to show us what they have found. It is also a reminder of the great many people who have cared for the collection and who have always been so awed at seeing an image that they stop what they are working on and say, hey, guys - Look. At. This. Picture…

-April Alvarez

* I really don’t mean anything by that, Neil. Or Greg. Or Donovan.