Nebraska's Noah
Joel Sartore doesn’t have time for this. He’s far too kind to say so, not directly, but I’ve asked too many questions, stolen too many hours, and he’s not that interesting, he assures me. Yes, his images have been projected on the side of the Empire State Building. And the United Nations Headquarters. And St. Peter’s Basilica. And yes, he’s on a remarkable quest to photograph every captive species on earth. And yes, many agree the Photo Ark will be regarded as one of the great photographic endeavors of our time. “But the thing is, we’re all born, and we all age, and we all die. And we’ve got this little dash between the numbers on our tombstone,” he tells me over Zoom, a nest of gray hair running wild at the temples. He’s wearing the same khaki shirt he wore the first time we spoke and leaning forward into the camera, shoulders tight, as if the chair might suddenly take flight. “That’s all we’ve got, that little dash….”
Nearly everyone who knows Joel Sartore (’85) knows this much: Joel Sartore doesn’t slow down. “I've never seen him relax and do something where you just shut your brain off,” says Grace Young, his former assistant and business manager. “I don't think I ever saw him watching TV or listening to music.” His own kids used to steal their screen time when Sartore wasn’t watching, because “if you have time to sit and watch TV,” his daughter Ellen says, mimicking her father, “that also means you have time to help.” He’s Type A, she says. “Unstoppable.” The first time he photographed the Sandhill crane migration on the Platte River, one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth, he couldn’t sit still. “He was just Joel, you know,” recalls Mike Forsberg (’89), who shared his photo blind. Fidgety. Impatient. Where are the birds? Do we have to sit here all night? Will they land right here?
“Joel's an easy guy to be with,” Forsberg says with a boyish grin. “You're just not going to sit and spend a lot of quiet time.”
And why should we? After all, Sartore says, the world is on fire. Species are dying. Prairies are shrinking. Oceans are rising. People are suffering. There’s no time, in other words, to “sit around and do congratulations.” Asking Joel Sartore what it feels like to see his work projected on some of the world’s most iconic architecture is to ask Greta Thunberg about her YouTube hits; or Gloria Steinem about her Presidential Medal of Freedom; or Anthony Fauci about his mountain of honorary doctorates.
“I think it’s amazing….”
He stops.
“I try not to….”
He stutters.
“I’m so busy with the Photo Ark….”
He starts again.
“I think it’s great,” he says. “National Geographic really likes it, but I can’t think a whole lot more about it. These interviews are the most I’ve talked about myself in a long time, and it’s just not that interesting to me.”
